


Nine Syllables

by jouissant



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: Angst, Dubious Consent, Established Relationship, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-25 20:09:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 52,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2634653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the premiere of Trek 3, Zach and Chris take some time off to traipse around Europe, where one mysterious night in Italy has decidedly unexpected consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> At last, Mpreg Yoga Pine sees the light of day. Thanks so much to Rabidchild67 and Medeafic for saving my ass with this story at least 3 times each, and for generally being awesome; to Steammmpunk/ZQPeene for making AMAZING art that literally made me cry when I saw it, and to everybody on Tumblr and in the Pinto Bar for your enthusiasm and for letting me complain for like five months straight. 
> 
> Note: this fic contains mature themes. If you have any questions or concerns before you read, please message me on Tumblr (jouissants) or email me at jouissant at gmail. Thanks!
> 
> The title is from "Metaphors" by Sylvia Plath.

 

Carolyn’s resident looks way too happy. She ducks out of exam room 3 and leans against the wall, taking a deep and heaving breath. It’s the way you might look if something’s gone especially badly, except for the fact that she’s got a huge grin on her face. Carolyn is immediately suspicious.

“Dr. Meyer,” she says. Julia is her first name, Carolyn thinks. The resident straightens, looking appropriately concerned.

“Dr. Briggs,” she says.

“You’ve been up for twenty hours,” Carolyn says. “What are you so excited about?”

“Oh, nothing,” she says. “It’s just this patient in 3.”

Carolyn glances at her padful of notes. Damn EMR, she thinks. Can’t keep a thing straight without charts these days. “White male, thirties, abdominal pain?”

“Yeah, him. Uh, he’s--” she lowers her voice, glancing around conspiratorially. “He’s _Chris Pine_.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, Captain Kirk? From--”

“I know who Captain Kirk is, Dr. Meyer.”

“And the guy with him is--”

Carolyn sighs, holding up a hand. “Okay,” she says. “That’s enough. I want you to go see 7 instead.”

“But--”

“But right now you’re a walking HIPAA violation. How long have you been in L.A. again?”

“Just since July, but--”

“Whatever. That’s long enough to know that famous people live here, and sometimes they get sick. Doesn’t make them any different from anyone else in any of these rooms. So what’ve you got on this guy?”

“Uh, like you said. Patient is a white male, 37 years old, complaining of acute abdominal pain. He says it comes and goes. Heart rate’s a little elevated, not too bad. He’s pale and diaphoretic. He--he gave the nurses kind of a hard time, seemed a little reluctant to put a gown on. I guess he said he was cold, but--”

“Okay, thank you. I’ll take it from here.”

Dr. Meyer looks vaguely disappointed.

“Look,” Carolyn says. “Fifty bucks says this guy’s either got appendicitis or a kidney stone. Boring, right? 7 has abrupt onset chest pain at the midline. Could be an aortic dissection,” she singsongs. “That’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to get starstruck over in the ED. Now go. And page me if you need anything.”

Dr. Meyer pales. “Yes, ma’am,” she says, before scurrying off in the direction of exam room 7.

Carolyn shakes her head. Over at the nurse’s station, Sandy’s shaking with silent laughter behind her monitor. “I swear they get younger every year,” she says.

Carolyn just sighs theatrically. She turns her back on Sandy and grabs a fresh pair of gloves from the wall-mounted box next to the door. She takes a deep breath and goes into the room. _Appendicitis_ , she thinks. _Or a kidney stone._

The two men in the exam room are scared; she can tell that right off the bat. The patient--Mr. Pine, according to her notes--is sitting up on the table, pale and sweaty as described. His companion, though, is equally so, dark eyes big in his face and ringed under with bruised-looking shadow. They’re holding hands. Something in the back of Carolyn’s mind sits up and takes notice.

“Evening, Mr...Pine, is it?”

He nods tightly, then winces and clutches at his stomach. His partner bites his lip, looking from Pine’s face to the clock and back.

“Pine, yeah. C-Chris.”

“Thanks, Chris. I’m Dr. Briggs; I’ll be taking care of you. Can you tell me what brings you into the emergency room tonight?” She leans against the sink and crosses her arms.

“We already went through all this with the nurses and the resident,” says Chris’s companion tersely. “Can we just--”

“No, we can’t, Mr...?”

“Quinto. Uh, call me Zach.”

“Zach. I’m sorry, but I need to ask Chris a few questions and it’s really better if I can get him to answer in his own words.” She makes a show of turning to Chris, who is hunched on the table. “Now, what are you here for, sir?”

“My, uh,” Chris swallows, shooting a glance at Zach. “It’s my stomach,” he says. “It’s killing me.”

“Okay,” Carolyn says. “And when did this start?”

“Uh, a few hours ago,” Chris says.

Zach purses his lips. “First thing this morning, really,” he says quietly. “Right?”

Chris looks like he wants to say something in response, but before he can his face contorts in obvious pain and he curls in on himself, screwing his eyes shut. “Fuck,” he breathes. _“Fuck!”_

“So this pain is intermittent?” There’s no response; Chris obviously can’t answer, and Zach looks worriedly between him and Carolyn before she takes pity on him and nods for him to speak. He shifts in his seat nervously before he does.

“Yes,” he says. “It comes and goes. At first he was just uncomfortable, but...well, you can see what he’s like right now; he can’t even talk through it.”

Carolyn considers. “Has he had any vomiting or diarrhea?”

“I threw up,” Chris says, sounding shaky. “I haven’t really been able to keep a lot down today.”

“Did you eat anything unusual? Any drug or alcohol consumption I should know about?”

“No!” Chris says, so vociferously that under normal circumstances Carolyn might accuse him of protesting too much. But something about his manner tells her his vehemence is genuine--he sounds almost scandalized that she’d think he was drunk or high. Interesting.

“And where’s the pain located?”

Her question is answered by another attack, Chris gasping and clutching at his lower belly. She makes a note on her pad.

“All right, Chris,” she says. “I know you told my nurse that you didn’t want to undress, but I’m going to need to take a look at you if we’re going to try and narrow down what’s causing this. Okay?”

Chris bites his lip, looking distraught. He looks at his partner pleadingly, as if he thinks Zach can get him out of this somehow, but Zach just looks back at him, shaking his head slightly. “Come on,” he says. “You need to let her look at you.”

“Zach--”

“Jesus, Chris, what choice do we have?”

Carolyn crosses her arms over her chest. Something’s definitely going on here, she thinks. “Gentlemen, I can tell you right now, this is all going to go much more easily for everyone if you’re up front with me.”

Zach goes over to stand next to Chris on the exam table, resting a hand on his shoulder, tugging slightly on the sleeve of the oversized sweatshirt Chris is wearing. When he speaks, his voice shakes. “Chris,” he says. “Please. This has gone on for too long.”

Chris looks up at him, his lip trembling, eyes bright. “I’m scared,” he says. Carolyn looks at the floor. After all this time, she’s become adept at letting two people be alone together while she’s in the room. She hears a soft rustle of fabric, the faint squeak of rubber soles on the linoleum, the small sounds of two people embracing. One of them--Zach, she thinks--is murmuring something she can’t make out.

“All right,” Chris says after a moment, and she takes the word as her cue to look up again. With a final look at Zach, Chris pulls the sweatshirt off over his head. Beneath it, he’s wearing a flimsy white shirt that buttons halfway down his chest, and beneath the shirt, his abdomen is massively distended, curving upwards above the waistband of a pair of loose-fitting pants.

It takes every iota of professionalism Carolyn possesses not to gasp out loud. Her immediate thought is that this is either some kind of large scale fluid retention, or maybe a tumor, but why someone would let something like that go this long is beyond her. She steps closer, taking a deep breath, trying to will away her shock.

“May I?” she asks, gesturing at the hem of Chris’s shirt. His face is beet red, and as she plucks at the cotton with gloved fingers he makes a pained noise and buries his head in Zach’s chest.

“Shh,” Zach says, fingers combing a sweaty lock of hair back from Chris’s forehead. “You’re going to be fine.”

Carolyn draws back Chris’s shirt carefully, intending to palpate the mass, but as she does Chris cries out, writhing in pain and curling in on himself, drawing his knees up. He lets out a ragged sob. As she watches, his belly appears to tighten, like muscle tensing. The sight is familiar to her. It would be so normal as to be commonplace under a different set of circumstances.

She looks at Zach. “How long has he been like this?”

Zach gasps; Chris is clenching his hand in a white-knuckled grip and it has to hurt.

“It wasn’t always like this,” he says. “This, um, big. It’s...he’s been growing.”

“How long?”

Zach laughs then, a high pitched laugh that chills Carolyn more than anything she’s seen or heard at work in a long time. Zach’s smiling, but it’s wild and gleaming, white as exposed bone. He seems to realize how he sounds, because he claps a hand over his mouth and takes a deep breath. It isn’t quite enough, though, and the hysteria stabs its way through his attempt at an answer, making his voice cant up crazily.

“Nine months,” he says.

Carolyn makes an incredulous noise. “Mr. Quinto--”

Zach makes as if to grab her arm; she jerks away. Next to them Chris is seized with another wave of pain; this time he doesn’t bother to stop himself from screaming.

“Do an ultrasound,” Zach says.

She shakes her head. “We need to get his pain under control, get some fluids in him,” she says. “We’ll get him up to a room, and--”

“No,” Zach says. “I don’t think there’s time for that. Do you have ultrasound equipment here?”

“Of course,” Carolyn says.

Her stomach is churning, although she can’t say why. Through the back of her mind comes a parade of adages and terminology courtesy of years of training. Horses, not zebras. Differentials for acute abdominal pain, a laundry list of -itises and pulsatile masses and troubled organs.

“Get it,” Zach says. “Do the fucking ultrasound.”

She should leave, she thinks. She should step away, tell him she’ll come back when he’s gotten himself under control. She doesn’t. Next to them Chris is crying out again, face bloodless, hands scrabbling at the grey vinyl of the table.

“I can page the ultrasound tech,” she says.

“Not the tech,” Zach says. “You do it.” He reaches for her again, and this time he gets his hand around her wrist. This is assault, she thinks. I should call security. “Please,” Zach says. “Look at him. You’re thinking it, aren’t you? It’s fucking crazy, but you’re starting to think it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

_“Do the ultrasound.”_

Later, she won’t be sure why she listens. She knows only that she does, that she nods tightly at Zach once, tells him she’ll be back. Then she goes down the hall to get the portable ultrasound unit, the one they mostly use to look at torn ACLs, snapped tendons, angry gallbladders.

When she gets back into the room, wheeling the machine, Chris has moved onto his side. He’s curled around the mound of his belly, and Zach is talking to him again. He gets up when he sees her come in, looming in the corner of the room, shifting from foot to foot with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Chris? I’m going to need you to move onto your back again,” she says. He does; it seems like he’s moving through molasses. “Get his shirt,” she says to Zach, who pulls it up and holds it against Chris’s chest. Chris rests his hand on top of Zach’s, on top of the bunched fabric. Their touch is light, polite almost, but she gets the impression of clinging anyway.

“This’ll be cold, I’m sorry,” she says automatically, squeezing the bottle of gel over Chris’s belly and turning the machine on, watching as the monitor lights up. She takes a deep breath, poised, holding the ultrasound wand over Chris’s skin. She thinks maybe she knew then, but of course that’s impossible, because the possibility is so farfetched that the only thing that could have convinced her is what happens when she lowers the wand, presses it against Chris’s body. Carolyn knows the tricks the mind can play, and sometimes she feels like a detective, doing this job. Not always, but sometimes. Tonight, she thinks she might just be a witness.

When she comes back to herself, the wand is on the floor, lying in a puddle of clotting blue gel. The two men in the room are not looking at her. Zach has tears on his face, and for the first time tonight Chris is smiling.

“I told you,” he says.

Zach sniffs. “I know you did.”

Carolyn picks up the wand and strips off her gloves, tossing them in the trash. Then she leaves the room, takes out her phone and dials a number with hands that are only shaking a little. The hospital switchboard operator says a bleary hello.

“This is Dr. Carolyn Briggs in the ED,” she says. “Can you page surgery?”

***

“Do you believe in miracles?” Chris asks, apropos of nothing.

Zach looks at him. They’re in Amsterdam, sprawled on the grass in the Vondelpark, drunk on sun and freedom. They are not stoned, though Chris’s question has Zach wondering.

“We were saving the brownies for later, I thought,” he says.

Chris elbows him. “Shut up,” he says. “I’m serious. Answer the question.”

“Uh, cynical answer? Dead father at a young age kind of kills the whole miracle thing for a guy.”

Chris doesn’t reply, just stares up at the clouds. “That doesn’t sound cynical to me,” he says eventually. “That sounds logical.” He shifts a little closer to Zach on the grass, reaches out and takes his hand. Zach squeezes, and Chris smiles.

They’d both decided to take some time after the Trek 3 press tour, bum around Europe the way they were both too young and poor to really enjoy the first time around.

“Plus we slept on a lot of trains,” Chris said of his experience. “And I think I showered...twice in a month? I don’t know, man, I was 18 and gross. Anyway, I’d really like to avoid repeating those things if possible.”

Zach had grimaced and immediately googled the nicest hotel in Amsterdam. “I think that can be arranged.”

So it’s a luxe version of bumming around Europe, whatever. Zach’s sure his younger, punker self would be aghast, but after he finishes his idyll at the park he’s going back to a five-star suite and taking a bubble bath and nailing Chris in a king-size featherbed, so he really could not care less.

He rolls over and rests his head on Chris’s chest. The cotton of his shirt is warm, and Zach thinks he could fall asleep right here. People might be looking, but he doesn’t care. He’s been out for years at this point, and Chris...well. Zach loves Chris, and Chris will figure it out eventually. Which has been a sticking point, historically, but which is also one of several things he’s decided not to think about this summer. Anyway, if Chris isn’t moving now, Zach’s sure as hell not going to.

Chris brings a hand up and strokes lightly along Zach’s arm. “This is nice,” he says. He sighs. Zach can feel it, the rise and fall of breath like the swell of a wave. “Sometimes I feel like just packing it in, you know?”

“I never feel like packing it in, so no, I don’t know.” Zach lifts his head a little to try and get a look at Chris’s face. “Seriously, though? What would you do?”

“I don’t know. Write, maybe? I like writing. I just never have enough fucking time to do it.”

“I’ve read your writing,” Zach says. “Well, some of your writing. You’re good. You could make a run of it, I think. Like screenplays?”

“Eh, maybe. Or fiction. Is that too cliche?”

“Maybe we can come up with a nom de plume.”

“Kris Pino’s not subtle enough, is it?”

Zach snorts, shaking his head. “What even made you think of that in the first place?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I was probably stoned or something.”

***

After Amsterdam, they go to Italy. “Your motherland!” Chris calls it, but Zach’s pretty sure he just wants to eat as much gelato as is humanly possible in two weeks.

“That’s such bullshit,” Chris slurs around a frozen mouthful of _nocciola_. “I was hungry, okay, and this gelateria just happened to be right next to the hotel.”

“You booked the hotel,” Zach says, reaching around Chris’s defensively-placed spoon to steal a bite.

They’re in Rome for two nights before lighting out for the countryside, an honest-to-god Tuscan villa-cum-hotel that’s only a little bit decrepit. Anyway, it lends the whole place a kind of decaying grandeur that Zach can really get behind as an aesthetic. Chris prowls the grounds with his camera and they take long, meandering day trips through the campagna in their rental car. Zach lets Chris drive and watches the light play over his face as he watches the road, delicate blue eyes hidden behind ever-present Ray-Bans.

“I’m extra photosensitive,” Chris says. “My ophthalmologist said so.” They’ve pulled over to inspect a weathered-looking signpost. Chris takes the glasses off and squints into the golden afternoon, hanging them by an arm from the neck of his t-shirt. He leans over the sign.

“I think this says something about lemons.”

There’s a rutty dirt road leading up into the hills, and there’s no gate or other indication they should stay out. Zach looks at Chris and shrugs. “I’m game if you are,” he says. Chris hesitates, but after a second he nods.

“Cool,” he says. “Let me get my camera bag.”

He turns and jogs back towards the car. As Zach watches Chris go, skinny legs pumping in worn cutoffs like he’s a gangly kid bound for recess, he feels his heart swell the way it hasn’t in too long.

As it turns out, Chris is right about the lemons. The dirt road leads up to an old lemon grove, stooped trunks giving way to dusty green foliage, row after row out under a cloudless sky. The grove is tended by an elderly man who’s happy to show them his own slightly decrepit villa, and in a mishmash of Italian, English and French manages to communicate that there’s something else they should see, something behind the house beyond another stand of lemon trees.

Zach tries his level best to have the “is this the beginning of a horror movie” conversation with Chris using only his eyes, though he’s not sure he’s entirely successful. They follow the old man anyway, Zach operating under the assumption that between the two of them they should be able to take him out if need be, unless he’s packing something under his perfectly sun-bleached linen shirt. Damn, but old Italian men can dress. Zach guesses he could do worse than meeting his end in a Tuscan lemon grove.

There’s no murder barn, though. What there is is much cooler.

“It’s a ruin,” Chris mutters.

“Si!” the old man says excitedly. Zach gets the feeling his usual customer base is sick to death of being dragged through the pile of moss-choked marble poking up out of the tall grass. But Chris’s mouth has fallen open, and his hands are already fumbling for the buckle on his damn artisanal leather camera case, and that’s good enough for the old man and for Zach. And it is pretty cool, truth be told. This little outbuilding or whatever, tucked away in the weeds for centuries.

“Can we look around?” Chris asks, gesticulating wildly.

The man nods, grinning fit to burst with the air of a proud parent. He stands by with his hands on his hips as they duck down into the doorway, into the cool and musty air.

“This is amazing,” Chris says. “Zach, isn’t this _amazing?_ ”

Zach nods, remembering belatedly that Chris probably can’t see him in the low light. “It is,” he says.

Chris brushes against him and Zach starts, having miscalculated the distance between them in the shadows. Chris gets him around the shoulders and slings an arm around Zach’s neck, tugging gently. “Hey,” he says, nuzzling at Zach’s collarbone.

“Hi,” says Zach, glancing out at the doorway. “Dude, that guy’s right there still.”

“He can’t see.” Chris mouths along the line of Zach’s jawbone and kisses him deeply. Then he pulls away, laughing, half spinning Zach around with him in a wild circle as he moves through the room.

“This is so awesome,” he says. “Think about what it must have been like here. Think about what these walls have been through.”

Zach might not be as giddy about the place as Chris is, but he has to admit it’s an interesting thought exercise, imagining the little building standing by as the centuries spun on, as the people came and went. Here dropping a chunk of plaster, here a block of stone, here a whole section of wall. Here the mess of sticks tucked away in a corner, floor beneath it littered with what Zach thinks are owl pellets.

“I think I hear water running,” Zach says.

“What? Oh, yeah. Me too. Hey, do you think—“ Chris stops talking abruptly, feeling his way around the far side of the room to an especially dark patch of gloom. “I think there’s…yeah, no shit! Come here and check this out.”

Zach clatters through the debris blanketing the floor, trying not to trip. Chris has knelt on the floor and is tugging at something with his hands. “I think there’s a spring or something down here,” he says. “Looks like somebody came along and boarded it up.”

He kicks out, ostensibly at a piece of board, and abruptly a minor landslide washes over them as chunks of accrued mud and dirt shear off the wall and all over them. They cough as the dust clears.

“Chris,” Zach says. “Look.”

Chris’s activity seems to have cleared away an older section of the wall, set back a foot or so and covered over with what looks like patches of grey-brown fuzz but which Zach recognizes as moss so desiccated it’s practically mummified.

“Do you have a light?” Chris says.

“Yeah, hold on a sec.” Zach gets his phone out of his pocket and swipes his thumb over the home screen, illuminating their corner with a thin blueish glow. _It’s a fountain,_ Zach thinks. It must have been connected to the spring somehow, through some ancient but probably insanely advanced plumbing mechanism.

“Maybe this was some kind of spring house,” Zach says. “Look at this, here. It looks like statuary.”

He gestures at a figure that could almost be a person, were it not so thickly cloaked in plant matter. Chris leans in and begins to paw at the figure with his hand, scraping the moss and dirt off with his fingers. It falls to the floor in great clots, and Zach feels a vague sense of unease.

“Maybe you shouldn’t touch it,” he says, too late.

“Aw, man,” Chris says. “You were totally right. It’s a woman, look.” He’s managed to clear off a head and torso, and while any detail has been chipped and worn by the passage of time, he’s exposed what are unmistakably a pair of—

“She’s got a rack.”

Zach rolls his eyes in the dark. “Seriously? You are 37 years old.”

“Still younger than you, grandpa.” Chris scoots closer to the statue. “I think it was a fountain. Her mouth’s open, look.”

He runs his fingertips over a widened outlet, then jerks them back like he’s been burned. “Weird, it’s still wet.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yeah, it totally is. Here, feel it.”

Zach shakes his head. “No way, man. This place has been sitting around untouched for who knows how long. I’m not going to be the one to mess it up.” He runs his hands up and down his arms, feeling a sudden and probably imagined chill. “Hey, let’s get out of here,” he says. “That guy’s going to think we’re doing something untoward. And it’s too dark for you to take pictures, anyway.”

Chris bumps Zach’s shoulder with his own. “I’m down for untoward,” he says. He sighs. “But fine, we can go if you want.”

Zach doesn’t want to admit to the sharp sense of relief he feels. It’s ridiculous, after all, to feel so ill at ease in such a benign place. But it’s like he can feel the weight of years pressing in all around them here, and it calls up a whispery sense of trepidation. He wants to get back to the light of late afternoon outside in the lemon grove, to the neon of the rental car dashboard and the Italian Top 40 that’s the only radio station they’ve managed to find so far.

“We’ve got a dinner reservation,” he says. “And I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get back to the hotel.”

“I’m coming,” Chris says, as Zach turns to go. “I just—“ Zach looks back to see him reach out and brush the statue’s face one last time. Then he puts his hand in his pocket and follows Zach out.

The old man is nowhere to be seen when they get back outside. The sun’s dipped down lower than Zach thinks it should have, but maybe he’d been wrong about the time before. The light’s gone all blue and soft, mist starting to rise up between the lemon trees as the day ebbs away. They decide not to try and locate their erstwhile host, though there’s a glow coming from one of the downstairs windows that could be lamplight. There’s a little wooden table set up in front of the house selling boxes of lemons on the honor system, so Zach contributes a few euro in thanks for the visit. He tosses a lemon from hand to hand as they walk back down the road to the car. Halfway down he pockets it and grabs for Chris, and they walk the rest of the way with their fingers laced together.

As predicted, wending their way back to the hotel takes longer than anticipated, so that they barely have time to dress and splash water on their faces before it’s time for dinner. The dining room is candlelit and busier than Zach would have anticipated, but the food and wine are amazing so he really shouldn’t be surprised. They order a bottle of wine and a few small plates to share, Chris going to town on a plate of house made ravioli that he declares to be life-changing.

“I’m not sure you can have any,” he says to Zach’s questing fork.

“Aw, come on, share and share alike.”

“I mean, don’t take this personally or anything, but fuck off.”

“Oh my god, Pine,” Zach says, taking a sip of his wine. “You’re not even kidding, are you?”

“Nope.”

“How could I have made it this long without encountering your utter viciousness re: the sharing of food?”

“I’ve been on my best behavior,” Chris says. “I guess the bloom’s off the rose.”

“Oh, that is it,” Zach says, poking at a fat, sauce-soaked pasta pillow. “Give it here or we’re calling the whole thing—hey, Chris? You okay?” Chris has stopped trying to defend his food and is staring off into space. Presently, he lets his fork fall to the plate with a clatter and looks back at Zach, eyes wide.

“Chris?”

Chris reaches up and tugs at his collar. “Is it hot in here?”

“I’m fine,” Zach says.

Chris yanks his collar away from his neck. “I’m fucking burning up,” he says. “Jesus.”  
Abruptly, he starts to fiddle with the knot of his tie, then undo it completely.

“Dude, what are you doing? You can’t just—”

Chris shakes his head. “I can’t—I’m fucking hot, okay?”

Zach stares at him across the table. He looks flushed in the candlelight, the color in his cheeks high and rosy. His mouth has fallen open and he’s breathing deeply, like he’s trying to suck in as much air as possible, a gasping that puts Zach in mind of other things.

“Are you all right? Do you think you’re having some kind of allergic reaction?”

Chris draws in a breath, squirming in his chair. “I don’t know,” he says. “I can breathe fine, I just…I feel weird. And I’m _so hot._ ”

He fumbles for his water glass, fingers slipping in the condensation. He nearly knocks it over, and Zach reaches over on impulse and steadies it like he would for a child. Chris drags his fingers through it and scoops up an ice cube. He lifts his fingers to his lips and sucks the ice into his mouth. Then he looks across the table at Zach, eyes wide and glistening. His expression is glazed, like he’s more than a few drinks in, but the wine glass at his elbow—Chris’s first glass of the night— is still mostly full.

Chris moans, dropping his head heavily into his hand. His elbow is crooked on the table, and Zach can see his arm shaking with tension even through the sleeve of his shirt.

“Maybe we should get you up to the room,” Zach says. Chris doesn’t answer, just nods.

“Okay,” Zach says. “Sit tight; I’ll be right back.” He gets up from the table to find their server. Luckily, the staff are obliging, and soon he’s back at the table, helping Chris up and out of the room.

He gets Chris onto the stairs and sits him down, kneeling before him and brushing limp strands of hair back from his forehead. “I think we need to get you to a doctor,” he says.

Chris’s eyes flutter shut; he shakes his head. “No,” he moans, grabbing at Zach’s hand and pressing it to his face. He’s burning up, his face bright pink and damp with sweat. The way he’s leaning into Zach’s palm, though…Zach abruptly realizes it’s not the innocent gesture of an unwell person seeking comfort. Chris opens his eyes and looks right at him, and in his face Zach reads the last emotion he’d expected to see: unconcealed lust.

“Chris?”

Chris doesn’t answer. He just…pounces on Zach, knocking him off balance. He nearly falls down the stairs altogether, but manages to grab the handrail at the last minute. Chris follows, grabbing at Zach’s shirt front and pulling him up into a kiss. Zach struggles to get free, his heart pounding, feeling for all the world like the best course of action is just to run. He takes a deep breath, trying to quell the instinctive response.

“Chris, what are you doing? We’re in the middle of the hotel.”

Chris doesn’t speak, only whines, leaning in to Zach as if compelled by some invisible force. He rests his head on Zach’s shoulder for a moment, breathing like he’s just been sprinting. “I…I need…”

“What, baby? What do you need? I think we should go find somebody, get them to call an ambulance—” 

Zach’s not even sure they have ambulances here, out in the middle of nowhere. _Fuck,_ , he thinks. Could someone have spiked Chris’s drink? But no, they hadn’t left the table since sitting down, and Zach drank from the same bottle of wine. He drank more than Chris, even.

“I need _you_ ,” Chris moans, grabbing at Zach’s shirt again.

“What are you talking about? You’re sick, you’re—“ Zach holds a hand to Chris’s forehead again, testing. “—You’re burning up.”

Chris shakes his head, looking muddled as a lost child. “No,” he says. “I’m not…I’m not sick. I’m just…” He gestures fruitlessly, finally reaching out to grab for Zach’s hand and take hold of his wrist. He presses Zach’s palm to the crotch of his pants to reveal an unmistakable erection.

“Jesus,” Zach says. “You didn’t…did you take something?” Chris sometimes expresses a weird and not entirely healthy interest in those stupid erectile dysfunction drug commercials. Once he’d vowed to buy a script off some sketchy website and fuck Zach through the mattress for hours, but Zach’s never seriously thought he’d actually go through with it.

“N-no,” Chris says. “I promise. I just…I need you, Zach. Please, you’ve gotta fuck me. You’ve—”

“Fuck,” Zach says. Despite his fear and worry for Chris, Chris’s words and the desperation he’s projecting are getting to Zach. He’s starting to feel a little drugged himself, like proximity to Chris is affecting him physically somehow. “Come on,” he says, dragging himself upright and pulling Chris up by the arm. As soon as they’re vertical, Chris tries to wrap his entire body around Zach’s and threatens to knock them both down the stairs again. Zach manages to get him around the waist and drape Chris’s other arm around his shoulder, but even so it’s an arduous process to get the rest of the way up to their room. Chris’s body feels limp and heavy against Zach, and he still seems intent on trying to touch him as much as possible on the relatively short walk.

At their door, Zach fumbles with the room key and tries not to just drop it altogether as Chris kisses his way along Zach’s neck and rubs himself unashamedly against the outside of Zach’s thigh. He’s so hard, and the feel of him is making it impossible for Zach to think. “Please,” he chants. “Please, Zach, please please…”

“Shh,” Zach says, trying to keep the quaver out of his voice. “Just give me a minute; I can’t get the door open with you hanging on me like that.” He finally gets the key in the lock and they stumble inside. Chris is on him before Zach even has the chance to turn the light on, grabbing for his fly and pulling at the fabric like he’s forgotten how to work a zipper.

“What the fuck are you doing? Chris, just hold on. I think we both need to take a breath and figure out what’s going on.”

But Chris isn’t listening. He’s all over Zach, heat coming off him in waves, ripping at Zach’s shirt. Zach feels buttons pop off, flying into the dark. For the first time in a long time he’s reminded of how strong Chris is, the physicality of him. Zach shot a movie right after Trek wrapped and they’d wanted him skinny for it; he’d done tons of yoga and subsisted on brown rice and vegetables and grilled chicken and black coffee and spite for months, and though he’s been back to normal diet-wise since before the tour the weight’s been slow to return. So when Chris puts his mind to it, as he’s apparently doing now, Zach isn’t especially hard to overpower, to back into the bed and be shoved supine on the mattress. The light’s still off, and Chris has figured out what to do with Zach’s zipper.

“Chris,” Zach says again, trying to keep his voice smooth and soothing and level instead of the choked off squeak it wants to be. Chris is astride him now, one hand down Zach’s pants and the other under his hips, jacking them up. Zach watches him with a peculiar sense of detachment, like he’s on film. Chris yanks Zach’s pants down his hips, briefs and all. Then he reaches beneath Zach’s waistband—blue boxer-briefs with little green shamrocks on them; Chris had made fun of them just this morning—and gets his dick out. Zach lets out a shaky breath; at least Chris is taking more care with Zach’s actual anatomy than he had with his clothing.

 _”Chris,”_ he says again, weakly now, reasonably certain at this point that Chris is somehow beyond hearing him. Chris leans forward then and spreads one big, warm hand on Zach’s chest, where the loose edges of his ruined dress shirt part limply. At first the touch feels almost tender, but then Chris shifts his weight and Zach’s mouth falls open, because Chris is holding him down and Zach can’t breathe. Zach’s hands come up unconsciously, wrapping around Chris’s wrist. Zach tries to think—isn’t there supposed to be somewhere to press, some tendon to gouge with your fingers? Is this…is this really Chris on top of him like this? It is, though; it is Chris. Chris is holding him down. Chris is holding him down with one hand so he can get his pants off with the other, working them down his legs and kicking them away. His boxers go with them, and when he sits up again he moves the hand off Zach’s chest.

Zach scrambles halfway up after it, hobbled physically by the pants encasing his thighs and metaphorically by the looming presence of Chris, transported and achingly hard. Zach can’t help but look at him—Chris has shoved his hands up under his own shirt and Zach can see them moving over his nipples. He throws his head back and his mouth falls open, and Zach gasps at the sight. Chris’s dick is bobbing almost parallel to his belly, flushed purple with blood. It looks painful, and Zach’s own dick gives a sympathetic twinge. Zach manages to sit up a little more. He reaches for Chris, trailing his fingertips over Chris’s flank.

“Baby?” he asks, his throat tight. Chris looks up, blinking like he’s seeing Zach for the first time. He doesn’t say anything, though, just gives another whiny moan and glances down at Zach’s crotch.

“No,” Zach says. “Don’t—“ But Chris has already reached down and taken hold of Zach, moving his body over Zach’s lap and ghosting the head of Zach’s dick over the crack of his ass, thrusting his hips and moaning as if the very movement of the air over his erection is too much. He’s leaking, and the whole picture coupled with the humid drag of his skin against Zach’s dick is beginning to be too much. Zach sobs as he feels the first twitch of his dick, the first pulse of blood. It’s wrong, he thinks. _This is all wrong._ For all that they’re here together now, so close, he feels incredibly alone.

Chris spreads his legs wider and and begins to fist Zach’s rapidly hardening dick, too fast and with too much friction, but they’ve had plenty of rough sex before and Zach’s idiotic body can’t tell the difference. Before long, he’s hard, and Chris is rubbing Zach against his hole with purpose, trying to push him inside.

“Oh, Christ,” Zach says, coming back to himself. “No, you can’t,” he says, trying to squirm away.

Chris makes a tortured noise and clutches at Zach’s hip. “You’ve gotta fuck me,” he says, his voice rusty as if with disuse. “Need you to, I need you to fuck me, please—”

“You’re going to get hurt,” Zach says, feeling bereft. “Chris, you…if you want me to fuck you, you need to let me get the lube. You need to let me up for a second, okay?”

Chris’s eyes flutter closed at Zach’s words, like they’re physical blows. His grip loosens just enough for Zach to scramble out from under him and dart across to the bathroom. As he does, he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, lit only by the glow of one of their razors charging. He looks wild, just as bad as Chris, his pupils dilated in the low light. He looks wasted, much more so than he feels. He can hear Chris whining in the other room, broken-sounding, and rifles through the bag of toiletries on the counter until he gets what he needs.

Back on the bed, Chris is still up on his knees, his dick arcing out from between his legs. Zach thinks he looks like a sculpture, and despite the pounding of his heart and the churning trepidation in his gut, there’s a part of Zach that wants this, wants to lie back for Chris and let the night go where it will.

“Zach,” Chris says, pleadingly.

“Hey, baby,” Zach says, reaching for Chris. “I’m…I’m here, okay? What do you—”

Chris lurches forward, and for a moment Zach thinks he’s going to pitch facedown on the bed. He catches himself with a hand, fingers clutching at the rich Egyptian cotton of the sheet, caressing it like it’s skin. “Oh _god_ ,” he moans. “Please, Zach, I…”

“Okay,” Zach says. He arranges himself as he was before, lying on his back. Chris moves over him again, and it’s all Zach can do to squeeze out a handful of lube and slick himself with it before Chris is reaching out and rubbing the head of Zach’s dick over his hole again, a lewd kiss. Then he spreads his thighs wider, muscles trembling with exquisite tension, and sinks down onto Zach.

Chris cries out, body going taut, and Zach arches up off the bed as if drawn by a string. He thinks for a moment he might just come right now, but Chris stills just long enough to let Zach get his breath. He reaches out and finds Chris’s hand on the bed, tries to lace their fingers together, but Chris is transported and doesn’t notice, seems incapable of noticing. Zach feels a pang at the unconscious dismissal. He tries to dispel it via distraction, moving his hands up to Chris’s hips and bracing them there. His fingers rest just over the swell of Chris’s ass, and as Chris begins to move Zach closes his eyes and feels the soft flesh roll forward and back. Chris pushes up on his knees and settles back down again, the press of his body chasing the breath from Zach’s lungs.

Zach feels so hot, like Chris’s body is heating him up from the place where they’re connected, like convection, molecules bubbling up and out and collecting at the corners of the room. Zach imagines a throb, the space around them pulsing with a heat so roiling and muscular as to seem alive. Just a mouthful’s worth of oxygen would be enough to send it up.

Chris is gasping, the pumping of his lungs twinned with the clench of his muscles around Zach’s dick. He moves like Zach’s not even there. A moment ago he’d have been upset by it, but now Zach just lets himself drift, looking up at Chris and imagining that he’s just a fly on the wall, watching Chris, watching him jack off or fuck someone else. His face is a blissful picture, his body like a wire. He posts on Zach’s dick, he pushes all the way up off the bed and lets himself drop down onto it, Zach filling him deeper than he can remember ever having done before.

Usually Chris will protest when Zach bottoms out, especially if the angle’s wrong, but now he just moans and throws his head back, his hands running all over his own body. Zach wishes he could flip them over, that he could be the one to touch Chris like this. But he can’t get any leverage from down on the bed, and he’s worried about what Chris would do if he tried to move them. So he just hangs on for dear life, resting his head on the pillow and imagining that this is any other night. They’re back in Chris’s bedroom in L.A., Zach’s in New York. Or they’re in some yet-to-be created home on an unspecified coast, done up all modern in warm woods and Chris’s stupid curated chairs. Wherever they are, they’re them, together, with none of this strange drugged mockery of intimacy.

“Chris,” Zach sighs, just a hair louder than a whisper, his eyes shut tight.

He pictures Chris above him, looking down at Zach’s face. Chris always seems to study him when they fuck; Zach is the one who usually gets carried off, lost in a haze of pleasure. He used to find it jarring, the way he’d come back to himself and catch Chris staring. He’s softened to it now, though he can never quite get Chris to cop to whatever he’s looking for, whatever he’s found so far.

 _Just looking_ , he’ll say, and Zach will roll his eyes and then one or both of them will move or breathe or do something else deliciously torturous, and the thread of conversation will disappear again.

Tonight, Chris’s face is slack; there’s none of the strain Zach would expect from such a physically intense position. Chris’s muscles twitch and shudder under his skin, but he seems oblivious to it all.

Chris moans, low and long, and the sound sends a hot clench of lust straight to Zach’s belly. He tries to actively stop thinking of the strangeness of tonight, clearing his mind until only sound and smell and feeling remain: sweat and Chris’s cologne, the wet huff of his breathing, the slap of skin on skin. And the tightness, too, the grasping heat of Chris’s body, the way he feels so _wet_ inside, like Zach’s spent hours prepping him, plying his ass with toys or eating him until he’s begging to be filled.

They haven’t fucked like that in a long time—luxuriantly. Zach pretends they are, now. He remembers one night, long ago when they first got their acts together around each other. He remembers a long night of teasing in perfectly pressed suits and the way he stripped Chris when they got home, piece by piece, pressing wet kisses to every inch of skin as he laid it bare. He made Chris hang the suit up before Zach would agree to touch any relevant parts, and he still remembers the way Chris pleaded with him to do it, _please Zach please just—_ Like he’d die.

Other times, too, less charged but no less intimate. Fucking half-delirious with jet lag, one of them in on a late flight or a redeye, all those thousands of miles they’ve dragged ass, first off to work then home again, bitten-back arguments about time spent away and a litany of complaints they both know aren’t fair, fights they can’t stop having.

_I miss you. I miss you so fucking much every time you go. We have to stop this, we have to find some other way because I can’t do it anymore, I’m going insane here without you—_

_I know, I know, next one’ll be here, I promise, baby. I promise._

Next one won’t be here, wherever here is. It never is, and they always smile at each other and say it’s fine, it’s fine, can’t you tell how fine I am with this? Because they’re so healthy, so well adjusted after all this time. Because they went through some shit, didn’t they, but it’s fine, all fine.

Anyway. Those nights they seem to melt into one another. Those nights they cling, and move so slowly that Zach forgets who’s inside who.

On those nights, his orgasm often catches him unaware. One or the other of them will tense and cry out, and Zach will realize abruptly that oh, yes, there’s a physiological endpoint to this, despite the fact that he feels like he could carry on forever. In his more cynical moments, Zach thinks that if only he and Chris could conduct their entire relationship _en flagrante_ they’d be golden, and possibly also making headway on global warming and world peace. It’s always been their strong suit, sex, and Zach sometimes finds himself thanking his lucky stars that no matter what else seems to go wrong, they always have this.

Even now, even as fucked up as Zach’s rational mind knows this communion is, it…feels good. Feels amazing, even, and before Zach knows it he’s close. His hands have found Chris’s waist again, holding him in place so Zach can get just enough purchase to fuck up into him. The shift in momentum seems to finally, finally dislodge Chris, and he falls forward just enough for Zach to take advantage and flip them. Chris goes down sideways on the bed, eyes coming open dazedly. Zach grabs the back of his skull in both hands and kisses him viciously, still smarting a little from the earlier shock of Chris’s forcefulness. It’s reassuring to be back in control, and when he’s done with Chris’s mouth he rolls them again to lay his body over Chris’s and drag his knees up, sinking back in as deeply as he can go. After that, it’s only a matter of seconds before he’s gasping into Chris’s chest, cheek sliding in a slick of commingled sweat.

Chris flops back drowsily, his lashes dark against his cheeks. When Zach clasps his dick and pumps it clumsily he comes with an anticlimactic sigh, fat drops all over his belly and Zach’s hand. On impulse, Zach rubs his hand through it palm-down, feeling Chris’s pulse at the seam of his leg and groin. Hesitantly, he sips his middle and index fingers into Chris’s loose hole, drippy with come and scant remnants of lube.

“Fuck, you’re full of come,” he mutters. “That’s so hot. Chris?”

Chris sighs again, mumbling something Zach can’t quite make out. Then he settles back on the pillow and lets his legs splay apart. Zach wraps his arm around Chris’s right knee, tugging it up to kiss the inside. He leaves his mouth there as he lazily fingers Chris. He never gets to do this; when Chris bottoms he’s always up off the bed and into the bathroom inside thirty seconds, refusing to emerge until he’s performed whatever ablutions he’s deemed necessary. Not that Zach doesn’t get it—he does. But still. A little post-coital dirtiness never hurt anyone, and passed out as Chris is it’s sure not hurting him now. But being dirty’s no fun solo, and presently, Zach’s earlier twinge of loneliness comes back full force. With one last kiss to Chris’s bent knee he withdraws, holding his hand before him carefully. He goes into the bathroom and washes his hands in the sink. He wets a washcloth for himself and one for Chris, sponging himself clean and then returning to the bed.

As he finishes, tossing the washcloths back in the bathroom to deal with tomorrow, he’s struck with a bone-deep exhaustion. He feels like he’s swimming through the air back to the bed, and it’s all he can do to turn off the light, peel back the covers and draw them back over them both. He curls around Chris and shuts his eyes, a headache beginning to beat around his temples. He hopes he can fall asleep before it gets its hooks in him, because—

***

Zach blinks awake to a room that’s far too bright, and what feels like a knife jabbing him in the head.

“Ugh,” he moans, burrowing into the covers again. He has to piss, though, so his respite from waking life is short-lived. He rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand, staggering to the bathroom and itching the small of his back idly as he empties his bladder. Afterwards, he digs around in his shaving kit for a travel bottle of Advil, then runs the sink and ducks his head to drink straight out of the faucet. The motion makes his head throb. He goes back into the bedroom to find a bleary-eyed Chris, looking around like he’s not exactly sure where he is.

“Zach?”

“Morning.” Zach flops back into bed, rolling over on his back.

“I don’t feel good,” Chris says.

“Huh? Here, sit up, let me look at you.” Zach gets a vague flash of something—from last night, maybe, Chris on the stairs, drunk or sick or something. “Did you feel bad last night?”

“I don’t remember.” He sits up, face and chest flushed pink and sweaty hair plastered to his forehead. Zach brushes it back and presses his palm to Chris’s skin. “You’re hot,” he says. “Do you feel like you’re going to throw up?”

Chris screws up his face as if assessing. “I don’t think so.” He shifts in the bed, wincing slightly. “I’m sore all over,” he says. “What’d we even do last night?”

“I…I don’t know,” Zach says. “We went to dinner. I don’t really remember anything after that.”

“Must’ve gotten hammered,” Chris mumbles, lying back down drawing the blankets back up to his neck. “I wanna sleep some more.”

“Okay,” Zach says absently, settling next to Chris. Maybe he can sleep off the rest of his headache. But as he lies there, trying to drift off to sleep, he can’t shake the fact that there’s something important he’s forgetting about the previous night. It’s right there on the tip of his tongue, the memory drifting like a piece of flotsam cast up on shore and then pulled out to sea again.

In his mind’s eye, he can see them in the lemon grove. He can see Chris’s fingers curling around the stem of a full glass of wine.

***

“Blurgh,” Chris says.

Zach looks up from the menu he’s perusing. “Blurgh?”

Chris makes a face. “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t know, man. I’m just…” He gestures to his own menu. “Nothing looks good.”

“This is your favorite restaurant,” Zach says blandly. “The one we come to every year on your birthday—”

“—Despite the fact that you think it’s overrated. Which I know you do, you told me once when we were drunk and we made a fucking DiGiorno frozen pizza that you said was better than this place.”

“I…do not remember that,” Zach says.

“Well, I do. But anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is that logically I know that this place is awesome, and I know I want like five things on this menu. But I’m looking at them and they all sound gross.” Chris takes a sip of his water, looking stricken.

“Let’s get the bread service,” Zach says indulgently. Privately, he’s offended by the very concept of a $9 bread service, but it comes with an assortment of olive oils and butters that he knows Chris likes. “Look, they’re doing a house-made lavender honey butter this week.”

Chris frowns. “I guess.”

“You wanna get a bottle of Prosecco?”

Chris shudders. “Ew,” he says. “No.”

“Do I need to call 911? I’m genuinely concerned for you.”

Chris bites his lip. “Tell me about it. After all this fucking waiting, too—”

He’s joking, Zach knows, but the words cause a sour influx of guilt regardless. Because Chris’s birthday dinner’s been pushed back three weeks, in between a pair of photoshoots and Zach agreeing to a last-minute guest spot on a friend of a friend’s web series that required a quick trip to New York on Chris’s actual birthday.

“Look, I told you, you could’ve come with me. We could’ve made a weekend of it.”

Chris waves a dismissive hand. “And _I_ told _you_ , waiting around in your apartment for you to get done shooting’s not my idea of a good time.” He sighs. “Let’s drop it.” He slides a hand across the table. Zach doesn’t miss the subtle way his eyes sweep the room before he does it; Chris is nothing if not prudent. Trouble is, Zach stopped giving a fuck about that kind of prudence a long time ago.

“I’m sorry you’re not feeling well,” he says.

“Thanks,” Chris says. He closes the menu with a flick of his wrist. “Fuck, I’m just going to get my usual.”

“Do you still want the bread service?”

Chris nods, sticking his lower lip out just slightly. Chris has always pouted adorably. Zach’s not sure he even knows he’s doing it, but if he does it’s a bitch of a secret weapon when they fight. Even now, Zach can feel the irritation at the way Chris hesitated before reaching over the table draining away, replaced by an obnoxious case of the warm fuzzies. _Fucking Pine_ , he thinks, for probably the millionth time in the last decade or so.

If he’s honest, things have been weird since Italy. Well, they were weird before Italy, before the movie came out. But if Zach knows one thing, particularly about his relationship with Chris, it’s that there’s nothing like an international press tour to shake things up, usually in ways that are both ill-advised and intensely fun. They seem to have made a tradition of it over the years.

When the bread comes, Chris butters a slice contemplatively, dragging it through the little finger bowl of sea salt the restaurant has provided and stuffing it desultorily into his mouth.

“Good?” Zach asks. Suddenly, part of him desperately wants it to be, like he’s the host of a party that’s not going well.

Chris shrugs. He swallows, looking up at Zach and smiling. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it’s good.”

“Maybe you just needed to eat. You know how you get.”

Chris smiles tightly at him, and Zach takes a sip of his wine. It’s fine, he decides. It’s all fine, and if Chris is having an off night, it’s not Zach’s fault.

When they get home, it’s still early. They curl up on the couch and put on a movie, and when Chris falls asleep in the middle Zach doesn’t have the heart to wake him. He waits until Chris sits up groggily during the end credits before helping him off the couch and into bed.

“Sorry,” Chris mumbles. “I still feel funny. I dunno if you wanted to—”

Zach runs his fingers through Chris’s tousled hair. It’s longer; he likes it like this. “It’s fine, baby,” Zach says softly. “Go back to sleep.”

Zach tries to read for awhile, but he gets stuck on the same page for about fifteen minutes before realizing he’s internalizing precisely nothing. He shuts off the tablet and settles next to Chris, and tries to drift off to sleep to the sound of his breathing and the unsettling feeling that there’s something he’s forgetting to do. But he doesn’t have anywhere to be tomorrow, and the dog’s been walked and the doors are locked and the oven’s off, and so eventually there’s nothing left for Zach’s whirring mind to do but wind itself down to unconsciousness.

***

“Maybe you should go to the doctor,” Zach says.

“I guess,” Chris says, poking at his piece of toast.

“Chris, it’s been two weeks. And you look like you’re losing weight.”

“Hmm.” He picks up the toast and takes a big bite. He’s got a look on his face that Zach has become intimately familiar with since the night of the birthday dinner. It’s kind of heartbreakingly hopeful, like he thinks that this particular food is the one that’ll do it, will cure him of whatever’s going on. Every time, it’s like he’s saying a silent prayer to the gustatory gods, and every time he’s disappointed. Zach supposes it would seem ridiculous to anyone else, but when someone loves food the way Chris loves food it’s anything but.

“Plus it’s depressing to watch,” Zach adds. And it’s the wrong thing, he knows it is as soon as he opens his mouth. Chris crams the rest of the toast in his mouth and gets up from the table, stalking out of the room without a word. Zach sighs, resigning himself to finishing the rest of his cereal solo. When he’s done, he rinses the bowl out and sets it in the sink, then goes in search of Chris.

He’s sitting in the office in front of his laptop, earbuds in, staring at a Word document. Zach comes up behind him and leans on the edge of the desk, plucking at one of the earbuds with his index finger. Chris doesn’t bother to cloak his annoyance at the interruption.

“Hey,” Zach says. “I’m sorry. Okay?”

Chris presses his lips together. “Okay.”

“I’m just worried.”

“I know,” Chris says.

“And I think if you just went and saw somebody and found out that it was nothing—because it’s probably nothing, right?—we’d both feel better. And—“

“Zach,” Chris says. “I get it.”

Zach lets out a breath. “I know.” He sets Chris’s earbud back on the desk. Chris picks it up, but he doesn’t replace it. Zach decides to take that as a positive sign.

“What are you working on?” he asks.

“Oh, nothing. Just…writing stuff.”

“Oh yeah? You still thinking of giving it all up to become the next great American novelist?” He rests his hand on Chris’s shoulder, over the place where the soft cotton of his t-shirt meets warm skin.

“Um, about that,” Chris says.

“Wait, seriously?”

Chris spins around to look up at Zach. The look on his face makes Zach suck in a breath. Chris looks…he looks terrified.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Chris says. “Ever since that day in Amsterdam. And I think I’m actually going to give it a try.”

Zach slides off the desk and drops to his knees, crouching so they’re at eye level. “Oh my god,” he says. “Really?”

Chris hesitates for a second, then nods. “I backed out of that Steve McQueen project,” he says. “I did it right after we got back from the trip.”

“I didn’t think you were serious,” Zach says.

“Yeah,” Chris says. “I talked it over with my agent, with my parents. I’m just going to take things a little slower for the rest of the year and see how it goes. I wanted to tell you,” he says. “I did. I mean, I am. But I don’t know, you’re so fucking driven all the time, Zach. I thought you’d be…”

Zach rocks back on his heels. “You thought I’d be what?”

“I don’t know! Pissed off about it or something? Disappointed.”

“Jesus, Chris,” Zach says. “Is that what you think about me?”

Chris runs a hand over his face. “No. I mean…maybe? I didn’t think you’d understand. In Amsterdam, you said you didn’t get it, wanting to take a break. So I didn’t think you’d get it if I actually decided to go for it.”

Zach draws a long, shuddering breath. “Chris,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Listen to me. All I want is for you to be happy, okay? That is all I want. If you want to…to move to a cabin in the woods—“

Chris grins at that. “You’d come with me? Raise chickens and grow vegetables?”

“Maybe we could divide our time. Or the cabin could be in, like, upstate New York. I could commute.”

Chris smiles outright. It’s dopey and lopsided, and it makes Zach want to do excruciatingly soppy things that go well with being on one knee.

“You’d do that for me?” Chris says.

“I’d—” _I’d do anything for you._ “Yes. I would.”

Chris tips forward, and then they’re kissing, Chris sliding off his desk chair to join Zach on the floor. “I’m sorry,” Zach says between kisses. “And I’m sorry about your birthday.”

“What are you talking about?” Chris mutters. “Dude, this floor sucks, lets—”

They make it to the couch, and Zach ends up with a lapful of Chris, brushing his hair back from his face with one hand to kiss his cheeks, his forehead. Chris slides his hand down into the neckline of Zach’s shirt and pulls, and Zach would say something about caring for the integrity of his clothing if it wasn’t really hot and more of a move than Chris usually makes with him these days. On the couch like this, Zach can’t help but think about old times, about all the nights they spent just shy of plastered together, separated by a pillow or even, daringly, the thinnest layer of blanket. They wound up together so often in the wee hours that Zach finds it hard to believe that it took them as long as it did for one or the other of them to roll to one side and face the other in the dark and say _I really want to kiss you right now._

Zach doesn’t remember who did it first, just that when it happened it was a revelation. He remembers thinking to himself, heart beating half out of his chest on Chris’s battered old couch, that he couldn’t imagine anything better.

He’d been ridiculous, of course. Objectively, there’s been lots better. Better couches, for one thing, and better moments. But, still, nothing quite like that first time, the careful way they’d moved and the reverence with which Zach remembers lifting Chris’s shirt off, unbuttoning his jeans. Now, they’re careless with each other in their familiarity, Zach letting Chris yank his shirt off over his head, flip them around and press him against the back of the couch.

“I want you,” Chris says. “Lemme fuck you.”

“Yeah,” Zach says. “Okay. Sure you wanna do this here?”

Chris smiles, cheeks pinked up like he’s been out in the cold. 

“Yes.”

He kisses Zach again, quickly, and then slides off of him to canter into the bedroom. He emerges a second later tossing a tube of lube from hand to hand. In the interim, Zach has slipped off his jeans. He’s kneeling on the couch, stroking himself idly through his boxers. Chris collapses next to him, dipping a hand into Zach’s waistband.

“Take them off,” he says, leaning in to mouth at Zach’s neck.

“Take yours off.”

Chris is still wearing pajama bottoms, and he slips them off easily, tossing them aside.

“Oh god, we should put a towel down,” Zach says. “The couch.”

“Will you listen to yourself? Hey, remember the time we totally ruined that dude’s bed at that party?”

“That was so embarrassing. I had to buy him new sheets, Chris. And I just wanna say— _ah_ —that I would never have done that if I hadn’t been fucked up out of my mind.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Chris says. “Look at us now. Old and married and concerned about getting lube on our fucking Pottery Barn couch.” He slides back between Zach and said couch, so Zach’s in his lap this time, and makes a show of squeezing lube on his fingers.

“Like you’d ever buy a couch from Pottery Barn, Pine,” Zach says, because what he really wants to say is that they’re not. They’re not married, though whether or not they’re old is up for debate. And yeah, that’s definitely the wiser choice, focusing on the provenance of Chris’s soon-to-be-defiled couch rather than the fact that Zach was just a hairsbreadth from bringing up the M word.

He lets his head fall forward onto Chris’s shoulder, breathing steadily in and out as Chris runs his slick fingers from Zach’s tailbone to his balls, circling his hole. “Haven’t gotten to do this in forever,” Chris says.

“That’s because you’re such a slut for it yours—oh _fuck_ , Chris, that’s—”

Chris presses into him, two fingers right off the bat, and twists in a manner that Zach can only describe as highly unfair. Chris laughs softly.“I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

“Fuck you.”

“On the contrary.”

“Guh,” Zach replies. He lifts his head off Chris’s shoulder to look him in the eyes. They’re so close like this, Zach thinks. So good like this, always. “Do it,” he says.

“Don’t wanna hurt you.”

“You’re not.”

Chris looks down at his lap, fisting himself with lube and lining himself up. Zach can feel the head of Chris’s cock nudging stickily against his ass.

“Come on,” Zach says. Then, “Oh.”

Chris is big; he always forgets how big Chris is until he’s working himself inside this way. Zach lets his mouth fall open and Chris takes advantage, taking hold of Zach’s jaw and holding him still to kiss hard. He drops his hands to Zach’s shoulders and braces. There’s nowhere for him to go but deeper into Zach, nowhere for Zach to go at all, nothing for him to do but sit on Chris’s lap and take him in.

“Oh my god,” Chris says. He smiles at Zach again, that sunny puppy grin that feels totally incongruous right now. “I love you,” he says.

Zach sobs out a breath and smashes their mouths together, wanting to kiss the sweetness out of Chris’s voice, draw it up out of him like honey, like venom. Because Chris scares him like this, smiling all white and clean and talking about living room furniture. Like this, Zach feels eminently breakable.

***

Zach peers around the curve of the highway, silently praying for it to remain as deserted as it’s been for the past ten minutes. He’d really prefer not to die on a desolate stretch of the PCH. It’s pretty, but Zach has grown rather attached to his life over the years. He edges further off the asphalt, into the weeds. Maybe if a car comes he can just throw himself off the embankment and hope for the best.

“You never went to the doctor, did you?” he asks Chris, whom Zach will be able to blame for his untimely death should it come to that.

Chris doesn’t answer, just folds at the waist again to retch into a Velveeta-colored stand of California poppies. One of his hands is plastered to the passenger side door of the car like it’s an anchor. Zach inches closer to Chris, reaching out tentatively and running his hand down Chris’s back.

“Chris?”

Chris shakes his head.

“We need to move; this is practically a blind curve.”

Chris straightens, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He leans into Zach for a moment, then moves away to rest against the hood of the car. “My sunglasses fell off,” he says.

“Aw, baby.”

Zach ventures over to the clump of newly-christened flowers, deftly locating Chris’s Ray-Bans. They’re only a little puked-on, and Zach congratulates himself on only hesitating for a moment before cleaning them off with the hem of his t-shirt. He hands them back to Chris.

“Good as new.”

“Thanks,” Chris says weakly.

“You okay to get back on the road?”

“I think so. But can you…do you mind driving?”

“Of course not,” Zach says, even though driving Chris’s cars isn’t his favorite thing. He’s pretty much always afraid something’s going to break and that Chris will subsequently never forgive him. Back on the road, Chris turns the air conditioner up full blast, training the flow of air directly on his face. He takes a sip from his water bottle, slumps back against the seat, and shoves his sunglasses back on.

“Ugh,” he says.

“You never—”

“I heard you the first time,” Chris snaps.

“We just had to pull the car over in the middle of fucking nowhere so you could vomit,” Zach says, fully aware that he sounds like a patronizing asshole and failing to find the wherewithal to care. “This has been happening for months, Chris. Something’s going on.”

“I know, okay? I just…I feel fine when it’s not happening, so every time I think it’s going to be the last time. And some days are better than others.”

Zach sighs, staring out at the road. They’re driving up to the wedding of a friend of Chris’s, after which they’ve decided to spend a few days in the Bay Area before wending their way back to L.A, because Chris is evidently setting part of his mystery writing project there and wants to take some reference pictures and “soak up the atmosphere.” It’s fine with Zach; he’s due back east for work in a week or so, but for now he has some down time. And though Chris has been fairly cagey about letting Zach see what he’s working on, the clear excitement on his face when he talks about it, even in vague terms, is enough to make Zach feel included. And he gets the need for privacy; he has to spend days, weeks sometimes, with a character before the idea of somebody watching him feels less than completely mortifying. That he doesn’t always get that time is something he’s still dealing with, years into his career.

“So where exactly do you want to go?” he asks Chris, deciding to leave the issue of Chris’s health aside for the time being. Not that he’s happy about it—in the passenger seat, Chris looks pale, and his clothes all seem to be a shade too big lately.

 _If he were working, he couldn’t afford to be so blasé about it_ , Zach thinks, and nope, that is not at all a productive train of thought. He shakes his head, glancing back at Chris as subtly as he can. He’s still staring out the window, eating from a sleeve of Saltines, and he hasn’t noticed Zach looking at all. 

“Oh, you know,” Chris says around a mouthful of crackers. “The hills outside San Francisco. Some places in Berkeley I remember from school.”

“Is this the story of one boy’s journey of sexual discovery on Telegraph Avenue? Can I play you in the movie?”

Chris leans over and elbows him. “Shut up,” he says. “And no. That is…the last thing I want to write. Who the fuck would want to read that, anyway?”

“I think you might be surprised.”

The rest of the drive is uneventful, Chris’s stomach apparently in a cooperative mood for a change. The wedding is in San Francisco proper, and they’ve booked rooms in a gorgeous little boutique hotel that bolsters Zach immediately. Chris, for his part, flops backwards into the bed and stretches like a cat, his shirt riding up over his belly. Zach perches next to him, running a hand over the exposed skin. It’s strange, he thinks, that despite the fact that Chris has been off his proverbial feed for the past couple of months, he hasn’t lost the slight softness here that Zach’s such a sucker for. In fact, it seems a little more evident than it usually is when Chris is thinner. Zach leans down and kisses the pale skin there, and Chris squirms.

“Dude. I’m beat from that drive,” he says. “So if you’re not settling in for the duration—”

“I can settle, I can settle.” He kicks off his shoes and curls up next to Chris on the bed, cheek pressed to his stomach.

“Mmm,” Chris says. “This is nice.” He rests his hand on Zach’s head, and Zach sighs, allowing the knot of worry in his own gut to be temporarily loosened.

***

Zach sits on the bed, swinging his feet back and forth, letting them bump into the mattress. He watches the second hand spin around the face of his watch. “It starts at six,” he calls. “We’re going to be late to the cocktail hour.” He’s trying his level best not to sound like an asshole, but he hates being late and Chris’s concept of on time is generally somewhat lax.

There’s a muffled noise from behind the closed bathroom door. Zach can hear the toilet flush, and the sound of splashing water.

“You okay?”

Chris comes out a moment later looking distinctly green. “Don’t say anything,” he says. “I’m going to call the doctor on Monday, okay? I swear. Just…let’s go. The sooner we go the sooner we can come back.”

“Do you want me to go by myself? Give your regrets or whatever?”

Chris looks like there’s nothing he’d like better, but he shakes his head. “They’re my friends,” he says. “It’d be weird. And you’re just my plus one. For the _wedding,_ Zachary, Jesus. Don’t freak out.”

Zach has jumped down from his perch on the bed in one smooth motion, shoving his hands in his pockets and fixing Chris with a withering look befitting his apparent demotion to plus one status. “I’m fucking over this,” he says, stepping neatly in front of Chris to open the door and walk out to the elevator.

They’re quiet on the ride over, polite over drinks. Zach watches Chris take a single precise sip from his vodka tonic before setting it carefully on the next passing tray of empties.

Maybe they made a mistake, Zach thinks. Maybe what they should have done, way back at the beginning, was lay it all out. Zach had always meant to. He’d always done it before. He was out. He didn’t date people who weren’t. But people were people, he’d reasoned. People weren’t Chris. And that was the hell of it, wasn’t it? Because it turned out Chris could hurt him just as badly as anyone, in the same shitty little ways. Worse, even, because try as he might to remind himself that Chris was as human as the rest of them, there was still that bright little corner of Zach’s heart that steadfastly refused to believe it.

“It’s not the same for me as it is for you,” Chris had told him once. Zach had been angry, but he’d had to agree in the end. They’re different, Chris and he, and for better or for worse it appears they can be famous in different ways. For all Chris’s near-pathological avoidance of casual public engagement, of the two of them Zach always seems to be the one whose flight under the radar is least turbulent. Tie themselves together any more than they already are and who can tell what kind of maelstrom might result, Zach thinks with no small twinge of bitterness. That Chris is still so worried about it is difficult for Zach to understand.

During the ceremony, Zach meets Chris’s eyes for what feels like the first time in hours. The hint of a smile twitches at the corner of Chris’s mouth, his gaze darting from Zach’s face up to the top of the aisle, following the path of scores of nodding, peachy roses.  
Zach rests his hand on the edge of Chris’s chair. Chris leans forward and contemplates it until the bride is kissed and it’s time for applause.

They don’t stay late. Chris makes his excuses and they walk out into the cool night. They wait for the valet, standing just a shade too close for friends. Zach steps closer, wrapping his arms around Chris’s waist, and they stay like that until a pair of headlights come around the corner.

***

“Do you…do you want that?” Chris asks.

“Want what?” They’ve been lying in the dark with the lights off for fifteen minutes. Zach’s been listening to Chris’s breathing, waiting for it to even out. It hasn’t.

“You know what,” Chris says.

Zach smiles into the dark. “What, blush roses and two hundred of our closest friends?”

“You know what.”

“You proposing, Pine?”

He feels the shift and dip of the mattress as Chris rolls over onto his side. Zach knows that if he turns, if he takes his eyes off the sliver of blueish light bisecting the ceiling, he’ll be trapped under a weight he won’t be able to throw off. He keeps looking up. He can feel Chris watching him.

“I…yeah,” Zach says. “I want it. Maybe not with all the extraneous shit, but…yeah.” He swallows. “What about you?”

“I don’t know,” Chris says.

Zach nods. He knows, he’s known. More or less, anyway.

“I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” Zach says, though his chest clenches unpleasantly. They talk about marriage every so often, mostly obliquely, offhand. Zach can’t remember Chris ever having asked quite so bluntly before.

The tension of the moment seems to have broken, so Zach turns to look at Chris.“You feeling better?” he asks.

Chris makes a noncommittal sound. “Kind of. I’m tired.”

Zach shifts closer to press a kiss to his forehead. “Go to sleep, then.” Chris nods. He turns over on his other side, facing away from Zach. After a moment, Zach rolls himself, scooting closer and tucking his body around Chris’s.

“I love you,” he says to the nape of Chris’s neck.

Chris stiffens slightly, then relaxes. “I love you too,” he says.

The next morning dawns grey. A storm has come through during the night, leaving the morning new-hewn and clean. Zach feels hollowed out, strange, replaying Chris’s question over and over in his mind. _Do you want that?_ He watches Chris shove clothing back into his overnight bag haphazardly and fights the urge to say something about it, the clothes or Chris’s question or both.

After they check out they drive up into the hills around the city, parking the car at a trailhead and getting out to walk. Zach brought running gear; they’d talked about splitting up and meeting back at the car later, but this morning Zach finds himself loathe to leave Chris alone. He’s halfway afraid that if he lets Chris out of his sight, he’ll disappear altogether, car and all vanishing over one of the dun, grass-tufted hillocks never to be seen again. Chris has a sweatshirt on, the hood tugged up over his head. Zach snaps a stealthy picture with his phone and stares at the captured image while Chris fiddles with his own camera, the pink tip of his tongue protruding thoughtfully from the corner of his mouth. In moments like these, Zach thinks he sees the truth of Chris. He wonders if it’s a universal kind of curse, to see one’s partner so clearly only from the outside in, or if it’s unique to him. It would figure.

***

They don’t talk much on the ride back south. Chris has procured a fresh box of Saltines and jams them into his mouth at periodic intervals, which seems to stave off any pit stops. They stop about halfway at a bed and breakfast Chris knows, one his family’s apparently stayed at for years. They’re the only guests, and the owner makes herself scarce, which suits them both just fine.

“Oh man,” Chris says, standing out on the balcony in the dusk. “Katie and I used to play like crazy out here when we were kids. My mom was always scared we’d run off the cliffs by mistake; she’d yell and yell.” He turns back to Zach. “It seems so much smaller now, coming back,” he says. “Don’t you think that’s funny, how places always seem smaller?”

“Come here,” Zach says. He suddenly badly wants to touch Chris. Chris comes, padding across the room in bare feet, and Zach wants to admonish him for it, tell him he’ll catch his death even though he knows that’s all bullshit. He wants Chris to smile at him, all hundred million watts of it, and tell him so. Chris sits next to him on the bed and Zach grabs a handful of his shirt, pulling him in to kiss—

“Oh,” Chris says, grimacing. “You—did you—”

“Did I what?”

“You smell like that coconut shampoo from home.” Chris looks aghast.

“I know,” Zach says. “I brought a travel size.”

“Fuck,” Chris says, clapping a hand over his mouth and bolting for the bathroom.

He doesn’t bother closing the door, and Zach sits ineffectually on the bed, watches him drop to his knees and throw the toilet seat up to hit the tank with a bang. Zach winces as he watches Chris’s whole body fold in on itself, presumably in an effort to expel anything and everything it can. The process seems to go on forever, long past the point when his stomach should be empty. Zach slides off the bed and goes into the bathroom, moving slowly and hesitantly.

“Chris?”

Chris makes a pained noise, resting his head on the edge of the bowl and gasping, trying to get his breath back. Zach reaches for him, laying a hand between his shoulder blades and rubbing carefully. “Hey,” he says. “Better?”

“I don’t know.” Chris spits into the toilet. “Ugh, I barely ate all day; it’s like all green and watery and it tastes like shit.”

“Stomach acid.”

“Gross.” He makes a face, dragging the back of his hand over this mouth.

“Here,” Zach says. “Hold on.” He takes a washcloth off the towel rack and goes over to the sink, running the water hot. Then he kneels next to Chris on the floor and wipes his face, finger combs limp, sticky hair off his forehead. Finally, he runs the cloth over Chris’s mouth.

“C’mon,” he says, moving to help him up. “Let’s brush your teeth. It’ll get the taste out.” He helps Chris over to the sink. “Sit,” he says, and Chris groggily complies, half-leaning half-sitting on the counter. Zach locates Chris’s toothbrush and wets it, then squeezes out a thick line of toothpaste. He runs the brush under the tap again, because that’s how Chris does it. He decides actually brushing Chris’s teeth for him might be a step too far, though the impulse to do just that is strong. He watches Chris do it instead, clumsy as a child. He leans over the sink and spits foamy white. He licks at a residual smear of toothpaste clinging to the corner of his mouth and looks up at Zach.

“Thanks,” he says. “I think the mint helps.”

“Yeah,” Zach says. “We should get you a bunch of mints to keep around. Or ginger or something, that’s supposed to help too.”

“This sucks,” Chris says.

“I know,” Zach says. “But you’ll call when we get back, and we’ll figure it out.”

“Can we just go straight home? I’m sorry, I know we were going to make a whole thing out of it, but—”

Zach cards his fingers through Chris’s hair again and kisses his temple. “Of course,” he says. “Of course we can. Now come on. Let’s go to bed.”

“It’s only like eight,” Chris says.

“Bed.”

Chris follows Zach out of the bathroom dutifully, pawing through his bag and extricating a wadded pair of flannel pajama bottoms. After he strips off his jeans and shirt he turns to the side, catching his reflection’s eye in the mirror over the bed. Zach sees his gaze travel the length of his own body. He frowns, and he half raises his hands as if to touch himself at the waist, where his stomach meets the waistband of his briefs. But then he glances back at Zach and lets his hands fall again.

“What’s wrong?” Zach asks.

“Huh?” Chris says, pulling the flannels on. He’s not meeting Zach’s eyes anymore. “Nothing.”

***

Zach sits in the waiting room, reading an ancient copy of _People_ and holding Chris’s hand while they wait to be called back. Chris’s palm is sweaty, and he keeps pulling his hand back to wipe apologetically on his pants. Zach squeezes his hand, sweat and all, wanting to tell him that he’s been exposed to way more suspect bodily fluids in the course of their time together. He doubts that’s an appropriate conversational tack to take at this particular moment, though. The office door opens and a woman comes in. Chris drops Zach’s hand. This time, he does not favor Zach with an apologetic glance, just looks at the floor. Zach takes hold of his magazine with both hands now, and reads his horoscope for May 2012.

“Mr. Pine?”

A nurse is smiling at them, holding a chart. Chris gets up, looks at Zach with an unreadable expression.

“You want me to—”

“Um,” Chris says. “Yeah, sure, if you want to.”

Zach’s not actually sure he wants to, but it’s probably shitty to stay in the waiting room while your boyfriend gets worked up for his mystery illness. So he tails Chris back to the exam room, aware of the woman in the waiting room watching them go. He says a silent prayer that she’s just curious and not someone who happens to have TMZ on speed dial.

The nurse gives them an awkward few moments for Chris to change into the ubiquitous too-short paper robe, and Zach makes an attempt to defuse the tension in the room by marauding his bare ass. He lands a few well-placed smacks and elicits a squirmy giggle from Chris, so he decides to call it a win.

“It’s going to be fine,” he says. “Don’t stress.”

“I know,” Chris says, biting his lower lip. “But I just keep thinking about it. Like what if it’s…not fine? What if it’s something—”

“Dude. It’s not. Your delicate constitution probably just decided to get more delicate.”

“I don’t have a delicate constitution,” Chris says petulantly.

The nurse knocks then. “It okay if I come back and take some vitals?”

She takes Chris’s weight and asks him his height, gets his temperature and heart rate and blood pressure. “And you’re coming in for…it says here nausea and vomiting? And how long has this been going on?”

“Couple months,” Chris says.

“Okay,” she says, typing something into the computer monitor in the corner. “Well, we’ll get the doctor in just a minute and find out what’s going on. Sound good?”

Chris and Zach nod dutifully, and they’re left to sit in silence for another few minutes.

“Have you been here before?” Zach asks.

Chris nods. “Couple times. But just, like, for my annual and a Z-Pak or something.”

“So this doctor’s had her finger up your ass? Should I be jealous?”

“I dunno, he’s pretty hot.”

“Oh, _he._ Now you tell me.”

The doctor is pretty hot. Zach’s always had a thing for uniforms of various stripes, and this is no different. He imagines the two of them out in the car after this is over, after it’s found that Chris has some allergy to burrata cheese and they can go back to their regular, vomit-free lives. _Did you get a load of that stethoscope?_ he’ll ask, and Chris will probably make a bad joke about Zach examining him later.

“Morning, Mr. Pine,” the doctor says. He extends a hand, which Chris shakes. Zach wonders if his palms are still sweaty. The doctor turns to Zach next. “Dr. Pandit,” he says. “And you are—“

“Uh, Zach,” Zach says. “I’m his—”

“We’re together,” Chris says quickly, shooting Zach a tight smile over Dr. Pandit’s head.

“What he said,” Zach says, laughing a little nervously, though why exactly he feels nervous is a mystery to him.

“Okay, then,” Dr. Pandit says, clearly aware that something about this interaction is flying over his head. “So, you’re having some GI upset, Chris? Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what’s going on.”

Chris looks at his hands, interlacing his fingers and studying them like they hold the answer to the question.

“It’s nothing really dramatic,” Chris says. “It’s just…kind of been going on for awhile.”

“How long’s awhile?”

“Couple months? Two and a half?”

Dr. Pandit turns to the computer monitor. “I’m going to take some notes in your file while we talk,” he says. “That okay?”

Chris nods.

“Can you describe how you feel when this happens?”

“It’s just…all of a sudden,” he says. “Sometimes I’m eating; sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’m hungry, and sometimes eating seems like the worst idea ever. Or, like, weird smells will set it off. And then I throw up, and then I’m usually okay for a little while.”

Dr. Pandit nods and types away at the keyboard. “Do you remember anything unusual that happened around the time it started?”

“We went on a trip,” Chris says, nodding at Zach. “It wasn’t too long after we got back from that, right?”

Zach shrugs. “I guess not,” he says. “It was your birthday. We went to that restaurant and you couldn’t eat anything.”

“And you haven’t noticed any foods in particular that seem to bother you?”

Chris screws up his face as if in thought. There aren’t; for all Zach hopes that this is just some niche food intolerance, he somehow knows it’s not. Later, he’ll wonder exactly how much he knew then, how much he wasn’t letting himself think about. But now he just knows that there isn’t any rhyme or reason to what affects Chris. Bland carbs help, crackers and bread. But sometimes the most innocuous thing will suddenly become intolerable to Chris, or Zach will make him some food to order, one that Chris is certain he’ll be able to keep down, and a bite later he’ll be running for the bathroom. It’s a fucking mystery, as far as Zach’s concerned.

After the barrage of questions, Dr. Pandit wastes no time in detailing a series of tests they’re going to run, tubes of blood that will be sucked out of Chris and spirited off to some lab to be centrifuged and agglutinated and read like tea leaves.

“Do you think it’s some kind of allergy?” Chris asks. Hopefully, Zach thinks.

“Could be,” says Dr. Pandit. “I want you to keep a food log, if you can—see if there’s not some kind of correlation there. And we might want to talk about doing some kind of elimination diet down the line. But there are some other tests I want to do as well, to rule out non-dietary causes.”

Zach swallows. “Such as?”

“Oh, things like ulcers, acid reflux…”

There’s a pause in which Zach swears the temperature in the room drops ten degrees. “And?” he asks. Chris is looking at his hands again.

“And there’s no reason to suspect anything more malevolent than that, Zach. Persistent nausea and vomiting like this does raise a few red flags, but look, Chris, you’re young and healthy. I’m confident that we’ll get to the bottom of this quickly. Now, if you don’t mind lying back on the table there, I want to take a quick look at you before we have Jen come back and get some blood. Sound good?”

“Um,” Chris says, and for a second Zach thinks he’s going to do something ridiculous like refuse. Then: “Fine.” He settles on the table, and Dr. Pandit comes alongside, rubbing his hands together over Chris’s belly. It’s freezing in the room, and Zach’s certain the gesture is meant to warm them. But he can’t help but be put in mind of some kind of divination ritual, something ancient, something—

There’s a flash of a room, low and dim and musty-smelling. And then low light, and Chris above him, and _feeling_ , Zach swimming in a vast sea of it, and the air is warm as blood—

“Huh,” says Dr. Pandit.

“Huh?” The sound brings Zach out of his momentary reverie. He meets the doctor’s eyes over Chris’s supine form. The expression on his face is one of chagrin—at himself, maybe, for slipping. Because Zach might not have been a hundred percent present for his obvious response to examining Chris, but the doctor doesn’t know that. And Chris…

“What?” Chris says hurriedly. “What is it?”

“I’m just palpating your stomach,” he says. “Nothing to be concerned about.” He presses his hands to Chris’s body again, moving over the skin of his lower abdomen. Now, he looks to be concentrating. After a moment, he stops, moving away from the table and over to the sink to wash his hands.

“You can sit up now, Mr. Pine,” he says.

“What is it?” Chris asks again. “Did you…did you feel something?”

“I’m going to step out and let you get dressed,” Dr. Pandit says. “And then we can talk a little about where to go from here.”

“What the fuck,” Chris says when they’re alone. “What’s going on? You were watching him, weren’t you? He totally hesitated.”

Zach shakes his head. “I’m not sure. I was kind of zoning.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m sorry,” Zach says. “I got this weird flash of, like, a memory or something. I don’t know what it was.”

Chris gets up from the table and dresses. He puts his jeans on first, fiddling a little with the button fly. He runs a hand over his belly as if he thinks he’ll be able to identify what gave the doctor pause. “What do you—“

“What?” Zach says.

Chris just shakes his head and puts his shirt back on.

When the doctor comes back in, he’s got a bunch of paperwork and Jen the nurse in tow. “Jen’s going to draw some blood,” he says. “And then I want you to give the front desk a call as soon as possible so we can schedule some followup testing, okay?”

“What kind of testing?” Zach asks, slipping his arm around Chris’s shoulders.

“I want to take a closer look at Chris’s stomach,” the doctor says. “We can go in endoscopically, down the throat—it’d be an outpatient procedure, you’d just be under some light sedation and you could go home the same day. Depending on what we find—which, again, is most likely nothing—I’d follow up with an abdominal CT or MRI. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it—”

“It’s cancer, isn’t it?” Chris blurts. “That’s what you’re worried about.”

Dr. Pandit raises his hands quellingly. “I just want to be sure and cover all our bases,” he says. “I will say that prolonged nausea and vomiting can be associated with some cancers, but I want to make it very clear that I have no way of knowing if that’s what we’re dealing with here. And I can’t know anything more until we take a look. Now, I want you both to go home and relax, okay? Keep the food log and pay attention to any triggers. And we’ll be in touch with the results of your blood work.”

He rests a hand briefly on Chris’s shoulder, looks from Chris to Zach and back again. “It’s going to be fine,” he says. “We’ll get to the bottom of it, and get you back on track.”

Zach isn’t sure he actually responds. He thinks he nods, but mostly he’s watching Chris watch the door as it swings shut after the doctor. He finds himself badly wanting to kick the nurse out too, to toss her test tubes and needles down the hall after her, but he supposes that sort of reaction is generally frowned upon. Instead, he stands next to Chris and holds his hand, buries his nose in Chris’s hair as she takes the blood. When she’s done, she smiles at them apologetically as she smooths on the bandaid. She offers Chris the paperwork, and when he just stares at it blearily Zach takes it instead, because they’re together and that’s what happens. Because Zach’s here for better or for worse even if they never get around to making it official.

“We’ll call about the rest of it,” Zach says at the desk, handing over his credit card for Chris’s copay.

In the car, Chris studies the paperwork Dr. Pandit gave him, the description of the procedure he wants to do, an alphabet soup-y Latinate mishmash that Zach finds tiresome to look at, let alone attempt to pronounce.

“So when do you want to get it done?” Zach asks as he turns out of the parking lot.

“They’re not going to find anything,” Chris says, folding the papers in half widthwise and tossing them into the back seat.

“What?”

“On the tests.”

“I mean, I hope you’re right, but—“

Chris makes a huffing sound, his face turned toward the window. At first Zach thinks he’s crying, but a second look reveals the twitch off his mouth, the squint of his eyes, and Zach realizes he’s laughing, grinning to himself and watching his own reflection in the glass.

“Chris? How do you know?”

“Just…a feeling.”

“A good feeling?”

“Yeah.”

Zach opens his mouth to reply. He wants to scold Chris, to turn the car around and drag him back to the office to schedule the procedure right fucking now. But another part of him, most of him, wants so badly to follow Chris headlong into his sudden giddy certainty that he can’t bring himself to say a word.

“You up for some food?” he asks instead. It’s a loaded question these days, but Chris just turns to look at him, eyes bright and clear, and Zach feels as if he’s tilting, sliding precipitously towards some destination he can’t name.

“I’m fucking starving,” Chris says.

***

New York has always been Zach’s, even the rapturous way Chris talks about loving it. Zach used to think it would be theirs eventually, that one of these days he and Chris would board that flight east for the last time, for good. Maybe they will one day, but it seems increasingly likely to Zach that their lives, if they stay entwined, will be perpetually bicoastal.

“My bags are packed, I’m ready to go,” Zach sings under his breath.

There’s a soft rustling noise behind him; Zach can hear someone swallowing.

“Hey,” he says to Chris. He doesn’t turn around.

“You done?” Chris asks.

“Soon.” They’re going to get tacos. Zach is going to make Chris buy.

“Skunk’s freaking out, I think. He’s been under the couch for like an hour.”

“Yeah, he hates packing. He’ll be fine tomorrow.” He does turn now; Chris is wearing threadbare jeans and one of Zach’s t-shirts. It clings to him, and Zach would swear he was doing it on purpose but for the fact that Chris seems not to have a manipulative bone in his body. Zach wishes he could say the same for himself. “Thanks for letting him stay.”

“Of course,” Chris says.

“He gets so agitated flying. I think it’ll be better for him, and besides, I’ll be gone all day—“

“Zach,” Chris says. “He’ll be fine.”

“I know, I just feel shitty about it.”

“He’ll be fine,” Chris says again. “He’ll be my writing buddy. Curl up under the desk and keep my feet warm.”

“Fuck,” Zach says. He bites his lower lip, and then Chris is stepping forward, gathering him up. “I don’t wanna go,” Zach says into his neck.

Chris sighs, his breath warm at Zach’s ear. “Let’s go get some tacos,” Chris says soothingly, and it sounds so ridiculous that Zach has to laugh. They walk out to the car, Zach’s arm draped around Chris’s waist. He feels a little softer there, and Zach insinuates a hand beneath the t-shirt. Chris twitches, trying to move away. He was always ticklish.

At dinner, Chris eats four tacos and his weight in chips and queso. “I’ve been feeling way better,” he says to Zach’s raised eyebrow.

“That’s just because you didn’t want to keep doing that food log,” Zach says. “Or the elimination diet, or the esophygastricwhateverscopy. Which Pandit was super pissed about, by the way. You could totally tell.”

“Zach, it was inhumane,” Chris says. “No dairy or wheat or anything good, basically. I’m not fucking acting right now, you think I’m going to go on some cleanse? Hell no. I’m going to sit around and eat fucking bonbons—”

“And write your novel?”

“And write my novel. Plus I told him, and you. I’m feeling way better, and my blood work was normal, and it’s been weeks since I threw up.”

Zach takes a long slug of beer. “He’s just worried.”

“He just doesn’t want to get sued,” Chris corrects, taking a sip of Coke. “Which he’s not, because nothing’s wrong.”

“You should come with me,” Zach says. “Write in New York. My office there gets the best light in the apartment.”

“But it’s _your desk_ ,” Chris says. “I told you, I think I need to stay. Be alone for a little while. It’ll be like a retreat.”

Zach’s not sure how he feels about that, but fine. “As long as you promise not to retreat completely. Seriously, you get in these _fugues_ and don’t leave the house or answer the fucking phone more than every couple days, and the next thing I know I’ve got your parents, your sister and half your friends breaking my door down trying to figure out where the hell you are.”

“I do not,” Chris says. But it’s true and he knows it; last time it happened Zach had been shooting in London and had come home to find that Chris had repainted most of his house himself and planted a bonafide citrus orchard in the back yard.

“You totally do.” Zach sighs. “Fuck, am I seriously leaving for two months?”

“You seriously are.”

“And you’re seriously not coming with me.”

“Zach—“

Zach stabs at the remaining guacamole with a shard of chip. “I get it,” he says. “It still sucks.”

“We’ve always known how much it sucks. And before you go on one of your ‘what if’ sprees, there’s literally nothing short of one or probably both of us quitting outright that will fix it.”

The fact that Chris is essentially doing just that, albeit on an allegedly temporary basis, has not escaped Zach. He decides against stating as much.

“It’ll be over before you know it. It’s not like we haven’t done this before. And for longer, way longer even.”

Every other weekend on location domestically; a visit halfway through for things that are further afield. That’s been the deal since at least a year in, when Chris shot in Singapore for four months and they both nearly went out of their minds trying to tough it out. That they’re not even going to try for that this time feels wrong to Zach, even if the rationale behind it makes sense.

“Have you talked to anyone lately? Your people?”

“Why?” Chris asks.

Zach shrugs. “Just wondering if you were putting any feelers out.”

Chris fixes Zach with a long look. “I specifically told them not to,” he says. “Not for the rest of the year at least. Remember?”

Zach nods.

“Look, I know you think I’m just fucking around,” Chris says. “Just…let it alone, okay?”

“I never said that. I never said anything like that, Chris, you’re putting words in my mouth.”

Chris just blinks at him and drains the rest of his Coke. Zach feels fizzy and full from the beer and the food, a little buzzed and all the more irritated for it. Chris hasn’t been drinking, and his abstemiousness has underscored just how much they used to drink together: beers after work, a bottle of wine with dinner. Zach misses it, and it bothers him that he misses it, and he somehow can’t bring himself to broach the subject with Chris, because what kind of fucking wino complains about that?

They finish the meal in near-silence, Zach plunking down cash so they can get out of there faster. In the car, Chris turns the music up just loud enough to discourage conversation, and Zach doesn’t argue. When they get back to Chris’s he goes into the bedroom and inspects his luggage again, digs out a forgotten pair of boots from their roost in the corner of Chris’s closet. As he rearranges the contents of his suitcase to fit the new additions, he hears a soft noise from behind him, over by the door.

Chris is hovering, tracing an imaginary line on the tile with his big toe. “Can I—“

“It’s your house,” Zach starts to say, before Chris crosses the room in two long strides and kisses him, one hand on Zach’s face and the other clutching a fistful of his shirt. Feeling surges through Zach. Chris’s body is a lightening rod, concentrating the uncertainty that hangs in the air like mist, distilling it into this one thing, the thing they’ve always done right.

Zach grabs at Chris’s shirt too, trying to pull it up over his head. Chris resists for a moment, pulling back the way he did in the driveway, but then he seems to give in, letting Zach drag the shirt up, throwing his arms up in the air so Zach can get it off over his head.

Zach runs a hand over the slight curve of Chris’s belly, down below the waistband of his jeans. “You have been feeling better,” he says. “Eating again.”

“Stop,” Chris whines.

“I like it,” Zach says. “You know I like you like this. All soft.”

He lowers his head and bites at the skin below Chris’s navel, and Chris yelps. Zach loves him like this, bulkier. Chris is never totally ripped; his body just doesn’t seem to be made that way, which is more than okay with Zach. He feels almost diminutive next to Chris now, but it’s still easy enough to get him under Zach on the bed, to make him lie still while Zach gets their jeans off and inspects Chris’s dick, flushed and heavy against his thigh. He lowers his head to place fluttering kisses along the length of the most prominent vein there, from root to tip, and by the time he gets up to the head Chris is gasping and jerking his hips up off the bed to meet Zach’s mouth.

“Going to miss this,” Zach says, breathing out hot and wet against Chris’s skin.

“Oh god, please,” Chris whines.

“Please what?”

“I don’t know,” Chris says. “Anything.”

“You gotta tell me, baby. I’m not a mind reader,” Zach says.

Chris snorts in spite of himself, and Zach grins.

“Suck me off,” Chris says.

“Mmm,” Zach says, fisting Chris lazily. “No. I mean, I’ll suck you, but I want to see your face when you come for me.”

“Oh,” Chris sighs. “Oka—Zach, Jesus _Christ._ ” Zach has closed his mouth around the head of Chris’s dick, swirling around the soft skin, the ridge where it meets his shaft. He moves up on his knees, adjusting his positioning the better to take Chris all the way down his throat. Chris sighs and rests his hands on Zach’s head, flexing the fingers just slightly like he’s trying to keep himself from pulling Zach’s hair. Zach hums, the oldest trick in the book but it still destroys Chris just as surely as it probably did when he was fifteen. He brings a leg up and wraps it around Zach’s body, pinning him, and he does grip Zach’s hair now. Zach struggles against it, more playfully than anything else, but in the next moment the sensation looses something in him, some sense memory, and suddenly he’s pushing up off of Chris, gasping for air.

“Hey, you okay?” Chris reaches for him but Zach pushes him away, hauling himself up to sitting. Chris pinning him to the bed, Zach struggling beneath him. The air so hot, tropical almost, and cloying—

“Zach?”

Zach shakes his head. “I keep…I remembered that thing again,” he says. “Like at the doctor’s office.”

“What?”

“It’s like a dream, but—”

“Hey,” Chris says. “C’mere, okay? Kiss me.”

“Chris—”

“Kiss me, come on.”

Zach swallows, scooting up the bed to Chris. His mouth tastes like shit all of a sudden, not Chris but the taint of that memory, spoiled wine and sex, oh god, the sex—he’s sure sex was tangled up in it somehow. He licks his lips and lets Chris draw him in, kiss him softly and run a thumb over a stubbled cheekbone.

“I want you,” Chris says. “Please?”

Zach shakes his head, not refusing, just trying to dislodge some of the cobwebby mess that seems to have come unstuck in his brain sometime in the last three minutes. What the fuck is it? It’s right on the tip of his tongue. But he doesn’t want to think right now, doesn’t want to feel this way, muzzy-headed and confused. Chris shifts against him and his dick drags a thread of fluid against the skin of Zach’s hip, and this, this is what Zach wants. He mouths down Chris’s sternum and off to one side, fixing his teeth on a nipple and drawing it into his mouth to suck.

“Ah,” Chris gasps, arching against Zach’s mouth. Zach nips around it, pressing parenthetical teethmarks to either side like some kind of primal ornamentation. The way Chris responds, the way his nipple hardens and the surrounding skin stipples with gooseflesh—it’s intoxicating, and it goes straight to Zach’s dick. He can feel himself hardening again against Chris’s leg.

“Hurts,” Chris says.

“Yeah,” Zach whispers, moving to the opposite side of Chris’s chest to mirror his handiwork. He bites maybe a little more savagely than he should, but Chris’s nipple is perfect, his pecs a little fuller with the extra weight. Too appealing to pass up.

“No, I’m serious—it’s—ow.”

There’s something in Chris’s voice that’s just a shade too hard; it brings Zach back just slightly, just enough. He looks up and blinks at Chris. “Bad ow?”

Chris rubs at his chest, spreading Zach’s spit across the reddened bite marks. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Aw,” Zach says a little petulantly, rubbing Chris’s skin soothingly with a thumb. “So fucking tempting, baby. How about this instead.” He blows a steady stream of air across Chris’s nipples, first the right and then the left.

“Oh god,” Chris says. “That’s…that’s okay.”

“Mm, yeah, I can feel how okay it is,” Zach says, grabbing Chris’s dick a little roughly. With his free hand, he reaches up and cards his fingers through Chris’s hair, making a fist and drawing it back. “You want a kiss?” he asks. It feels good like this, to be back over Chris on the bed. He feels heady with the way Chris looks up at him a little bemusedly, like he’s a half step behind Zach and is looking to be guided. Chris nods his answer to Zach’s question and Zach obliges him with teeth, trying to scare the last of that bad taste out, replace it with something he can take across the country with him and pull out when the nights get cold.

He crawls partway over Chris and fidgets in the bedside drawer for the lube. Chris grabs him around the waist and buries his face against Zach’s chest, his belly, kissing and licking and generally being a distraction.

“Oh my god, stop it,” Zach says, trying halfheartedly to bat him away. “I can’t fucking find the lube. Are we out? We can’t be out.”

Zach manages to locate the lube, and in the end it doesn’t take much to get the rhythm going again, though it’s considerably slower and sweeter than it might have been before. Zach takes his time with Chris now, lying alongside him and working him open for long minutes, until he throws his head back against the pillows and begs for it shamelessly, smile wide, knowing how much Zach loves to hear it.

“You kill me,” Zach says as he lowers himself over Chris, rubbing the head of his dick against Chris’s now-obliging asshole. He kisses Chris on the cheeks, the nose. “You kill me, you know that?”

“Mmm. I try.”

Zach pushes inside and stills. They both suck in a breath. “Oh god,” Zach moans. “You feel so good.”

“Yeah,” Chris says. “You do too.”

Zach eases himself down on top of Chris so their bodies are pressed flush. Chris feels so warm, and part of Zach wants to just curl up here and stay. Chris shifts then, moving his legs up as if in an attempt to take Zach deeper. “Come on,” Chris says. “More.”

“Just…just hold on for a second,” Zach says, catching his breath.

“Zach,” Chris whines.

Zach begins to move, a little reluctantly. Because the sooner he does the sooner this will be over; they’ll go to bed and before he knows it the alarm will blare in his ear and he’ll drag himself up and off to the airport in the dark. Chris probably won’t even wake up. He slips his arms between Chris and the mattress, the combined weight of their bodies molding them together in a leaden embrace. Zach can’t bring himself to move again; he’s surrounded by Chris, and he finds that he can’t imagine being anywhere else.

Chris shifts under him. “Harder,” he says. “Come _on_.”

 _No,_ Zach wants to say. _Let me stay here like this._ But he doesn’t say it; he just nods and kisses Chris on the mouth and sits up, slipping carefully out of him. “Turn over,” he says.

Chris obeys eagerly, flipping over and pushing himself up on hands and knees. “Zach,” he says. “Come on, I need it.”

“You’re so demanding,” Zach says. He means for it to be lighthearted, but he knows as soon as he speaks the words that it didn’t come out that way. Chris looks back at him, a troubled expression on his face, but before he can say anything Zach straightens, smacks Chris lightly on the ass and drives his dick back in. Chris moans and cants forward. If he wants it hard, Zach thinks, he can have it. And it’ll be just as good. It’ll be perfect. Zach will fuck Chris into the mattress, blow his load into his willing body with wrenching force, and it will be the perfect fucking sendoff.


	2. Chapter 2

  


“Okay, you’re on,” the producer says, frowning at something she’s hearing through her headpiece. She pats Zach on the shoulder and points at wall of light Zach guesses contains a stage. “Three, two, one…”

She gives him a gentle shove and he steps out, lifting a hand to wave at the audience, loud and enthusiastic. Jimmy’s leapt up from behind his desk to shake Zach’s hand, and as Zach walks with him up to the seating area he feels his heart pounding. Possibly the double espresso backstage was a bad idea, but Zach is always powerless in the face of coffee.

“So great to see you again, man,” Jimmy says, clapping Zach on the back.

“Definitely!” Zach says, grinning wide. His pulse resolves, a determined drumbeat he’s marched to a thousand times before. “It’s great to be back in the city.”

“We’ve missed you on the east coast,” Jimmy says. “You’ve been based in Los Angeles lately, is that right?”

Zach nods. “I had a few projects in the works out there after wrapping _Star Trek,_ ” he says.

“Which was out in May to strong reviews,” Jimmy cuts in. “How was that? You’ve been Spock for what, almost ten years now?”

“About nine, yeah, if you count from when I started talking to J.J. Abrams about the possibility,” Zach says. “And it was ten years ago, I think, that I opened my big mouth in an interview and kind of planted that seed.”

“So 2016 is a big anniversary for you.”

Zach taps his mouth with his index finger. “You could say that, definitely. A lot’s happened over the past decade, for sure.”

“Absolutely,” Jimmy says, glancing deftly at his notes. “You worked on _Heroes_ , you made three of the highest grossing movies of the decade, you’ve been on Broadway, you’ve done more TV—”

“Whoa, you putting me out to pasture or something? Where’s my gold watch?”

“No, not at all,” Jimmy says, waving a hand dismissively. “Just thought I’d go over your resume a little, give you your due. Because, look, you were under a lot of pressure with this last movie, weren’t you?”

They’d been asked a variant of this question over and over during the press tour; he and Chris had started keeping a tally. The movies had always had impossibly big shoes to fill, and the stakes had felt higher than ever—for the studio especially, since they were the ones hyping up the fiftieth anniversary of the original series. Zach, as ever, had tried to channel any tangible sense of pressure into motivation. He’d mostly succeeded, though he knew Chris had struggled a little more. Throw in the Shatner factor, and Zach had been on call for no small amount of damage control.

Zach presses his lips together, nodding slowly. “You could say that,” he said. “But I’m really happy with the film, and I think for the most part the fans were as well. It’s always going to be a balance between recalling the past and saying something new, and after three of these films I’m confident that we did that successfully.”

“We,” says Jimmy. “You mean the rest of the cast.”

Zach swallows. He fights the urge to tense; he hopes it’s not showing up on camera. He nods again, picking his words over. He’s grown deft over the years, plucking spin out of the air like pearls. “Yeah, I know this was a really important journey for all of us to take together.”

“And I know you’re close with a lot of your _Trek_ cast mates. How’s Chris Pine these days?”

The audience goes crazy, of course, and Zach fights the urge to shake his head. _Fuck you, Fallon,_ Zach thinks, only half good-naturedly. Who knows what has always been a topic of much debate between Chris and Zach, and their handful of mutual friends. Jimmy Fallon apparently thinks he knows something, based on the shit-eating grin he’s currently wearing.

“Chris is…Chris is great,” Zach says easily. He thinks he catches a shade of an eye roll from Jimmy, and he lets the corner of his mouth quirk up at the prospect. _Nice try_ , he thinks. _Not my first rodeo._

“You two see a lot of each other, then?”

“We’re close friends. We try and touch base when we’re not working,” he says. “But like I said, I’m looking forward to being back here, doing some catching up with things here on the east coast.” He enunciates the last two words carefully.

Jimmy leans forward over the desk. “Tell us about why you’re here,” he says, clearly acquiescing. “You’re in this new series, Black Road, right?”

“Yes, which is going to be really exciting. I love the creativity the web-only format allows for; it’s been really cool to see that evolve from a novelty to an accepted medium of delivery for episodic projects and film. And my character is going to be really fun to play, too.”

“You play a guy who gets mixed up with…a bad crowd, right?”

“Right. He’s sort of this hapless guy; he thinks he’s unhappy with his life, he thinks he’s bored. He figures out pretty quickly that things can get a whole lot worse.”

“So that’s out when?”

“The first episode premieres Tuesday. Everybody should check it out.”

“Absolutely. I’ve seen it; it’s great, and you’re great in it.” Jimmy drums his fingers on the desktop. Zach’s cheeks hurt from smiling.

“Thanks so much, man.”

“Give it up for Zachary Quinto, everybody! We’ll see an exclusive clip from Black Road when we come back…”

When he’s done, there’s a car waiting for him outside the studio. Zach waves the driver off, deciding to walk for awhile instead. He turns his collar up against the autumn chill and tugs a hat down over his ears. He smiles a little as he does so; it’s always felt like his city armor, the hat. Wearing it, he feels like can battle the elements and everything else, which is ironic because a cashmere beanie is arguably the least badass accessory ever. Chris likes to talk shit about it, which usually leads to gentle faux-punching and making out against walls.

As Zach walks, he lets the night wash over him, lets the polish of live television fall away. He thinks of Chris, of his wonderfully bullshitty non-answers regarding their relationship. Zach has always been great at putting his game face on, because up there on the spot it is a game to him, as high-stakes as their old wordplay competitions though decidedly less entertaining. He gets off on it, the rush of the polite deflection, responses perfectly crafted to create the illusion of disclosure when really they offer up precisely nothing. He feels so good in the moment, so abjectly gross in the aftermath. That’s the feeling he’s fighting now, wandering through the night on his way downtown.

It’s not like they haven’t talked about it before, fought about it even, picked it apart like they do most things. And like most things they worry at over and over, the disagreement has cured into a kind of detente, a healed over cicatrix Zach worries about testing the way a horse might favor a sore foot.

He takes out his phone and thumbs through his contacts. He has friends here, friends who are just his, and he’s not sure whether he wants to seek them out, embrace this temporary solo life or walk all the way home, pick up takeout on the way and watch bad TV and wallow in Chris’s absence. It’s late, but he hasn’t eaten. He doesn’t like being full on TV; the old camera-adds-ten pounds adage having given way to the fact that he always feels he does a little better with a bit of an edge, hunger or caffeine-spackled exhaustion or loopy press tour mania.

The phone rings on cue, and Zach’s heart leaps. But it’s not Chris at all, and when Zach sees the name on the caller ID he stays, out loud, “Huh.” He bites his lip, considering letting the call go to voicemail. _What the hell,_ he thinks. He lifts the phone to his ear.

“Hey, Jon,” he says.

There’s dead silence on the other end of the line. Then a nervous-sounding laugh. “Whoa, you answered,” Jon says. “Um, I…I was pretty sure I was going to get a couple minutes of voicemail time, to be honest. Might’ve been why I called so late.”

“Sorry to exceed your expectations,” Zach says, not unkindly. “I can hang up, if you want.”

“I think I can deal,” Jon says. “But thanks for the offer.”

“Any time. So, what’s going on? It’s…been awhile.” It’s been years, actually— there have been the occasional rushed conversations at awards shows or after parties, and sometimes Zach forwards Jon things he finds online, popular science or a gallery press release or a dumb quiz: _Which Simpsons character are you?_ , all introduced with one or two labored-over pithy lines in the manner of all communication with exes you still give a fuck about.

Jon had always been hard not to care about; that had been at least eighty percent of the problem.

“Oh, not much,” Jon says. “I just…I heard you were coming into town, and I figured that yeah, it had been a long time. I wondered if you might want to get together for lunch or coffee or something and catch up.”

The invitation gives Zach pause. “You know what? That actually sounds great.”

“Yeah?” Zach can hear Jon grinning over the phone.

“Yeah. When’s good for you? I’m off til Monday but we’re shooting at night for the first week, so lunch is good.”

Lunch is also harmless, which is probably why that was the proposition in the first place. Not that it matters; when he thinks of Jon now it’s with a kind of marshmallowy, hot milk affection born of nostalgia, perfect for lattes and sandwiches, well-lit clean-scrubbed cafes.

“Great,” Jon says. “There’s this place in Soho—it opened a little while back. I think you’d like it. They’re like mostly vegan? And they have really good soup. That’s their thing. And it’s been kind of soupy weather lately, so.”

Zach passes a stoop strewn copiously with fake spiderwebs, guarded by a pair of carved pumpkins. Soupy weather, indeed. “Totally,” Zach says. “You want to go tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Jon says. “Noon? I can text you the address.”

They say their goodbyes and hang up, Zach left with a heady mix of excitement and nerves and the ridiculously middle school thought that he should go home and pick out his outfit. He checks his watch. He said he’d call Chris when he got in, though he also gets the impression that Chris might not notice if he didn’t. Chris has been distracted when they talk; Zach’s got a persistent image in his head of Chris doing about five things at once, scribbling in the margins of some book and trying to hold up his end of the conversation out of a sense of duty. Zach’s not sure quite how to feel about that. Probably he’d feel worse if he hadn’t just made plans with Jon.

He’s frustrated all of a sudden, torn between a buzzy energy and the exhaustion born of a long day. He’s not sleeping well. Once, the city noise had been an ambient blanket, lulling him dependably unconscious every night. But now the blare of car horns and the grind of all-hours engines below Zach’s window is just a pain in the ass. He buries his head under a double stack of pillows and craves the comparative silence of Chris’s bedroom. And then the bed just starts to feel empty, and he’s got to go put on socks and get another blanket, and there’s not even the warm weight of a dog at his feet to keep Zach company. He rolls from his side to his back to his stomach and back again, cycling through until his brain finally gives up the ghost and shuts off, a process that can take hours these days. He isn’t looking forward to tonight’s installment.

He checks his watch—almost midnight. Too late to call anyone here, he decides, despite the fact that Jon just called him. He stops at a hole in the wall pizza place a couple blocks from home and buys two giant slices of pepperoni. He eats the first in big, greasy bites as he hits the home stretch to his apartment, the second more slowly once he makes it inside, sitting on the couch and scrolling through his Instagram feed. He washes the pizza down with a lonely beer that’s been in his fridge way too long.

When he’s done he goes to the kitchen and washes his hands, goes to the bedroom and changes into pajamas. Then he settles back on the couch, turns the TV on mute and dials Chris. The phone rings and rings and finally goes to voicemail. Despite the the fact that this outcome isn’t exactly surprising, Zach holds the phone away from his ear and fixes it with a glare, as though the force of his disapproval will somehow conjure Chris. Chris’s outgoing message ends, the beep coming too soon, and Zach’s reminded of Jon earlier. He wonders what that voicemail would’ve said.

“Hey, it’s me,” Zach says to Chris’s phone. “I’m just calling to say hi; it’s…like twelve fifteen on Thursday and I’m drinking a beer on my couch like a loser. I miss you. I love you. Call me. Bye.”

He sets the phone down on the coffee table and continues to stare at it for awhile. There’s a Seinfeld rerun on and he unmutes the TV to watch; it’s the one where Susan’s dead and George declares his intention to eat large blocks of cheese and do nothing on his couch all summer, or maybe both at the same time. Zach gets the feeling he should be hearing this on some spiritual level, but Chris isn’t dead—luckily— and he doesn’t even like cheese all that much.

He drags himself to bed when the episode is over, paging through a book without making any headway and finally giving the cause up for lost. He tosses the book off the bed and turns out the light, and tonight, mercifully, sleep comes quickly. In the middle of the night he wakes suddenly for some reason, a sound or the beam of a passing car’s headlights painting light across his window. He gets out of bed to take a piss and takes his phone with him, squinting at the screen in the too-bright bathroom. No missed calls, and it’s after one in California. He goes back to bed too tired and bleary to care much, and he stares at the ceiling for a long time before he falls back to sleep.

The next day, Jon’s in front of the restaurant when Zach arrives. He still hasn’t heard from Chris and is grumpily checking his phone, shoving it into his back pocket as he walks up. Jon’s looking in the opposite direction, wearing dark jeans and a grey cable knit sweater and looking like he should be picking apples upstate somewhere. He turns and sees Zach, his eyes brightening and his little default smile widening into something large and bright and genuine. Fucking Jon, he was always cute as hell.

“Hey!” he says, walking over to wrap Zach in a somewhat unexpected hug.

“Hey,” Zach says, smiling into Jon’s woolly shoulder. “Look at you, you’re all bundled up.”

Jon pinks up at that, running a hand through his hair. “What? Oh, yeah. I told you it was soup weather.” He looks Zach over. “You look good,” he says. “L.A. agrees with you.”

Zach snorts. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “But thanks. You want to go inside?”

Zach misses lots of things about New York, and one of them is its bizarre and endearing propensity for gimmicky, single-food restaurants: the mac and cheese place, the rice pudding bar, the overpriced donut shop. Not that the various concepts haven’t spread worldwide at this point, but New York just has a way of riding the crest of the wave and then hammering that fucker home so everybody knows it’s serious. Zach’s never seen so many soups on a menu at once. He wonders what they do in the summer. Because he doesn’t care what anyone says, gazpacho kind of sucks.

“It hasn’t been open that long,” Jon says when he asks the question aloud. “I’m not sure they’ve thought that far ahead.”

He takes a neat bite of grilled cheese, having dipped the sandwich in his bowl of tomato basil first. He swallows. Zach pushes his carrot-ginger around with his spoon, waiting for it to cool and also suddenly requiring something to occupy his hands.

“So,” Jon says. “How are you?”

“Oh god,” Zach says, taking a sip of water. “What’s this concerned inflection I’m noting?”

“I’m not concerned,” Jon says.

“Whatever, that was like a therapist voice or something. ‘Zachary, do you have anything you’d like to discuss today?’”

Jon laughs. “Do your therapists all sound like stern headmasters? That’s kind of hot. And I swear, I’m not _concerned._ I just—”

“You’re just concerned?”

Jon mimes throwing his sandwich across the table at Zach. “Shut up. _No._ We hadn’t seen each other for awhile, like I said the other night. And…a little bird told me you were kinda bummed about being here by yourself, so I thought I’d give you a call and…make sure you were okay.”

Zach winced. How he’d managed to embroil himself in such a hotbed of fucking gossip was beyond him. Not that he didn’t love his friends, but Jesus Christ. You’d think a guy could count on them to keep their mouths shut around his exes. Even if his exes were also still friends. It was complicated. He needed a flow chart. But Jon was looking at him, all soft-eyed, and it was predisposing Zach to levels of disclosure he was almost certain to regret later.

“This soup is really good,” he says.

“Is that code? Ooh, lemme try and figure it out. The soup is you. Oh, no, wait, the soup’s Chris—”

“Jon, come on.” He looks pointedly to either side of them. The gesture reminds him so much of Chris that it makes him feel a little ill.

“You come on; nobody’s even looking over here.”

Jon is right; they’re bordered by a dude who seems about eighty and a young mother with two toddlers, one of whom is busily spooning soup into his own lap. Zach casts another look between them and then leans over the table, closer to Jon. He raises his eyebrows. “Yes?”

“Are you good, Zach? Because you look like hell.”

“Jesus, who told you to say that? It was Jesse, wasn’t it.” He runs a hand over his face. “You just said I looked good, too. You’re so full of shit.”

“You do look good. But you look…tired,” Jon looks hard at Zach, like he can somehow divine the problem by means of careful observation.

“I haven’t been sleeping well.” There. A nice, concrete, biological predicament with a menu of straightforward solutions. Jon will love that, it will appeal to his pathological need to take care of people, which has always driven Zach so fucking nuts. “I think it’s the city noise. Do you think I should get some of those noise-canceling headphones or something?”

“Hmm,” Jon says. “So how _is_ Chris? I’m still assuming the soup is Chris, by the way.”

Zach rolls his eyes. “The soup is good,” he says. “He’s…look, you can’t tell anyone this, okay?” A futile request, but whatever. Zach tried. “He’s taking a break from acting. He wants to write.”

“Wow, that’s big,” Jon says. “He decent?” He sounds a little skeptical, and it stirs a surge of protectiveness in Zach.

“Yes, actually,” Zach says. “He’s really good. I haven’t read that much of his stuff…but yeah. He wrote a lot in college, I guess, and right when he was first getting into the business, but then he started working a lot and didn’t have time.”

“Does he have an agent? A literary agent, I mean.”

“I don’t think so,” Zach says. “He was talking about it with his team; I think they were going to put some feelers out. But that’s why he didn’t come out here with me. He’s holed up back at home—back at his place, I mean—working on his book.”

“Well, good luck to him,” Jon says. “That’s gotta be kind of scary, right? Calling it quits. For both of you, I mean.” He drags his sandwich crust around the soup bowl.

“He’s not quitting,” Zach says automatically. “He’ll go back to it.” As he says the words, he realizes that he has no idea if that’s true. They haven’t talked about it other than a few hints from Zach that have typically not been taken well. Zach thinks back to the day Chris told him, how nervous he’d seemed, and his stomach turns over. “And why would that scare me? I don’t care what Chris does. He could…he could throw it all away and go be a farmer somewhere and I’d be fine with it.”

“And you’ve told him this?”

“Of course,” Zach says, gratified that it’s actually true. The other thing about Jon is that he can smell a lie a mile away. It’s generally inconvenient, even if he is a great judge of character.

“Let’s be honest, though, can we really see Chris Pine retiring to barricade himself in an office and tap away at a keyboard for the rest of his life? I mean, writing may be fulfilling, but…”

“But what? Look, you know Chris. Barricading himself in an office is pretty in character, I’d say.”

“I don’t know, I just think…” Jon shrugs. “I know him, sure, but only through you, you know? He’s had his share of fun with…with this lifestyle. You really think he’d give that up?”

Zach frowns. “Is this really a question about his writing?”

Jon sighs. “Fine,” he says. “You got me, okay?”

“Ugh, see, this is Jesse too, isn’t it? I don’t know why he thinks sending my ex boyfriend to play relationship counsellor is at all a viable or appropriate strategy.”

“Get over yourself, Quinto. Like I’d call you up and buy you soup—which is probably getting cold, by the way— just because Jesse told me to hop to it. I did actually want to see you. And there’s something else, too.”

Zach takes a bite of soup and glares at Jon across the table. “What?”

Jon holds up his left hand. On his ring finger is a thick gold band; Zach can’t believe he didn’t notice before. He drops his spoon into the soup dish and it clatters against the side. “Oh my god, you didn’t,” he says. “To Pietro?”

Jon’s grinning fit to burst. He nods. “Yeah, we did it right after Fashion Week. It was tiny, we’re going to have a big party next summer. Pietro really wants to design our suits. And you’re invited, obviously.”

“Congratulations, man,” Zach says. “I’m really happy for you.” And he is, too, which is not always a thing he could have said to Jon. An odd look crosses Jon’s face then; it’s quick, but not quite quick enough to pass unnoticed.

“What?”

Jon smiles wider. “Nothing.”

“No way, I saw that look. What? And hey, you brought it up in connection with Chris and me, so if there’s something you’re trying to say you should just say it.”

Jon wrinkles his nose, and makes a show of pushing his bowl away. “Remember the Tonys after party?”

“That was two years ago,” Zach says. “I don’t—” And then yes. Yes, he does remember. Fuck.

“Jon, I was so drunk that night—”

“ _I think he’s it._ That is what you said to me. And I don’t care how drunk you were; you were in love and you were fucking miserable.”

“I wasn’t--”

“— In love and miserable enough to say that to me, about the person you basically left me for. No, don’t say anything, it’s fine. You’re a dick sometimes, Zach, but you’re not that kind of dick. I get it. I’d probably have done the same in your shoes. And anyway—” he holds up his hand again— “it’s water under the bridge. But you said it yourself: that was two years ago, and yet the two of you are still so clandestine, and you dance around each other in interviews and in public, and I _know_ you. I know it’s killing you.”

Zach slumps against the back of his chair. “This is a heavy fucking lunch.”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Oh, fuck you, Jon,” Zach says thickly. “You and your well-meaning _shit_. All this and you didn’t even take me somewhere I could get a damn drink.”

Jon looks at his watch. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

Zach sniffs. “Pietro’s not going to be pissed?”

Jon shrugs. “He’s in Milan for work. He’s probably surrounded by models right now. Our love transcends visiting exes and scrawny dudes with dangerous cheekbones. Now let’s go get you day drunk, Zachary.”

***

Zach looks at his watch. It’s just after three, and he’s edging into hammered territory. “This is trashy,” he says. “This is so trashy, Jon.” They’re in a booth at the Lobby Bar at the Bowery, because of course they are. “People are going to think we’re gonna get a room and hook up.”

Jon snorts. “Who fucking cares. Now drink your drink; you’re letting me get ahead of you. And if you think you’re going to make me forget about the whole point of this little enterprise, you are mistaken. So drink.”

“Ugh, you’re an asshole,” Zach says, taking a sip of his beer. “How’d you even find someone to marry you, anyway?”

“Tsk, tsk. Rude.” He leans close. The booth’s small, and the bar’s pretty empty, but even drunk— _buzzed_ , Zach thinks; he’s pretty sure Jon’s actually like a drink and a half behind—Jon’s aware the walls have ears. And it’s considerate, is what it is, which come to think of it is exactly what Zach’s been for Chris all this time.

“He’s so scared,” Zach says. “That’s the thing, you know? There’s something that scares him so badly about just coming out with it.”

“Just coming out, you mean.”

Zach huffs a mirthless laugh. “Now that you put it that way.”

“Well, that’s the root of the problem,” Jon says. “It’s not like he’s ashamed of _you_ , right? He’s just—“

“He’s not ashamed,” Zach says. “It’s not that. He’s just…he’s worried about what it’ll mean, and I think he’s pissed that he’s basically going to be gay in the eyes of the press when that’s not what he…what he is. Fuck, I don’t know. I get it. But then I don’t get it. But that’s just because I made my choice and it was the other choice, and so it’s hard for me to put myself in his position, right?”

He sighs. Next to him, Jon is quiet, swirling beer around in his glass. “Right?” Zach says again.

“I don’t know, or it could be that his choice is the wrong choice. Have you paused in your endless cutting of slack to consider that?”

“Of course I have,” Zach spits.

“I mean, what that says to me is that you basically think his shitty reasons—and they are shitty reasons, Zach— for staying closeted are more important than yours were for coming out. Every day you live your life with him, you’re saying that. Because you’re living in stasis, you know that, right? He’s making you live exactly the same way you’d be living if you hadn’t come out. And as somebody who was pretty fucking close to you, in a position to see you before and after, I think that sucks.”

Zach’s vision blurs; his eyes are hot and stinging. Yesterday he was worried about what shirt he should wear to see Jon, and now here he is about five minutes away from melting into a snotty, sniveling mess in public.

“God, I’m a wreck,” he says.

“I know.” Jon kicks him gently under the table. “I can’t take you anywhere.”

“Thanks for doing this,” Zach says. “I mean it. I…I treated you carelessly back then. For you to do this for me now…I don’t deserve it.”

Jon hesitates for a moment, then lays his hand over Zach’s where it rests on the table. He squeezes once, softly and quickly, and then just as quickly he pulls away. “Buy me a nice wedding present,” he says, winking. He smiles, a little sadly, and the look pricks at Zach. “But seriously,” Jon continues. “I do care about you. And I want you to be happy, whatever that looks like.”

Zach swallows; the lump in his throat remains, though, dauntless. “Thanks, mom.”

“Please. Would your mother get you drunk at three-thirty in the afternoon?”

Zach groans, resting his forehead on the table. “Not likely. Ugh, I need a nap.”

“Yes. You do. Let’s close out and then I’m putting you in a cab.” Jon gets up, ostensibly to make his way to the bar.

“No way,” Zach says. “I’ll walk it, it’s not that far.”

“Shut up, Zach.”

Zach lets his eyes close. “Okay,” he says.

Despite his protests, Zach allows Jon to pour him into a cab. “Call me,” Jon says. “Pietro’s coming back on Friday; we should all hang out. Oh, and you should come to our Halloween party.” He shuts the passenger door. Zach watches him wave from the sidewalk as the cab pulls away from the curb.

“Fuck everything,” Zach mutters against the cool of the window.

Back at home, he drags himself into the bedroom and pulls back the covers, for once relieved not to have to deal with dogs or boyfriends or anyone other than his sorry self. He crawls into bed; it’s just after four and the light outside is already beginning to pale as it wanes towards evening. Zach chugs a glass of water, lies back, and shuts his eyes.

On the nightstand, the phone rings.

“No,” Zach says, rolling over and covering his head with the pillow.

The phone goes quiet, then instantly rings again. Zach sits up, plucking the offending item from the nightstand and regarding its screen with a jaundiced eye.

Chris.

“Of course,” Zach says to the phone. “Of course you’d call me now.” He wants nothing more than to leave Chris hanging, but the fact that Chris got voicemail and still called straight back troubles Zach. He takes a deep breath and answers the call.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Chris says. “How’s it going?” He sounds painfully normal.

“Um,” Zach says. Fuck, his throat is getting all tight again. “It’s going.”

“Are you okay? You sound funny.”

Zach wipes at his nose with the back of his hand. “Not really,” he says. “But whatever. So what were you up to yesterday?”

“What? Oh, not much. Went out with some friends.”

“Oh yeah? Who?” Zach suddenly doesn’t want to be lying down, not at all. Even all the way across the country, the prospect of doing this with Chris now makes him feel hunted, like he should be on alert. And he is doing this now; he could feel the inevitability of it as soon as he decided to pick up the phone.

“Zach? What’s wrong?”

“Why’d you ask me about the wedding that night?”

“That was months ago,” Chris says, as if to himself. “I…I don’t know. I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say.”

“Not really,” Zach says. “I think it was a pretty apropos thing to say, if you want to know the truth.”

“Are you _drunk_? What time is it there?”

“You know what time it is, Chris. It’s four in the fucking afternoon, and yeah, when you called I was about to start sleeping one off.” He sighs. “You want to know what I did last night?”

“You went on Fallon,” Chris says hesitantly, like he’s aware he’s being baited into something.

“I went on Fallon,” Zach repeats. “Which was super fun, by the way. Jimmy says hi.”

“Hi,” Chris says, his voice dull.

Zach closes his eyes and tries to picture Chris, standing in their bedroom or sitting at his desk, feet bare and resting against one leg of the desk or scuffing at the tile floor. He’ll be wearing one of those dumb shirts; his hair will be a mess. Chris always smells like cotton. Sometimes when he’s is gone Zach takes up his pillow and breathes; he’s thought of stashing some of Chris’s dirty laundry in a Zip-loc, just in case. “I told you that night that I want it,” he says. “I do want it.”

“I know.”

Zach imagines Chris nodding.

“So why’d you ask, if you already knew the answer?”

Chris exhales. “I wanted you to finally fucking say so.”

“And you don’t,” Zach says, trying to keep his voice level. “Or, wait, let me guess, you might, but you’re too fucking scared—“

“Will you—”

“—Too fucking scared to go through with it. Because that’ll mean it’s real.” He’s trying to say the words instead of spitting them, but Zach’s got an abscess in him, and it is poisonous.

“What the fuck is even happening right now? It…it is real,” Chris says. “This—us— is real. All of the bullshit out there, Zach, that’s what’s not real.”

“It is! Fuck, it is real. You think I like it? I fucking hate it, Chris, but I hate it less with you. And I can’t do it anymore; I can’t sit a minimum of one-point-five feet apart in interviews with you, I can’t watch you apologize to your publicist for touching me, and I can’t watch you scan the room before you hold my hand.”

“I just—”

“And it’s not like it’s the best-kept fucking secret in the universe! It isn’t! You think people don’t talk? You think I haven’t heard it before, from the press, even? I play coy and I make my people follow up and keep it off the record. Not because I really give a shit at this point, but because you do.”

“I never asked you to lie for me,” Chris says, his voice hardening.

“Bull _shit._.”

“It’s not about not wanting people to know. People know, I get that. We’ve been lucky, that’s all. It’s just—it’s so much, Zach. It’s everything.”

“But you’re taking a break,” Zach says. “Right? You’re taking a break from it. So how can it matter so much to you? How can it matter more than us?”

There’s a rustling sound, like he’s moving papers around. “Why do you think I took a break?

“To write,” Zach says. His voice sounds small and quavery.

“Well, yeah, but…look, Zach, I needed to think, okay? I still need to think. I need to make sure.”

“Make _sure?_ This is me, Chris.”

Chris makes a frustrated sound. “Don’t you get it? If it wasn’t you…“ He trails off, not bothering to pick up the thread of the sentence again.

Because Zach gets it. He’s always gotten it. If it wasn’t him, Chris would be long gone. He knows because it goes both ways.

“I didn’t…I don’t want to fight,” Zach says, even though that’s mostly a lie.

“But you do, though,” Chris says. “You’ve got this fucking _sore_ you pick at all the time, and I don’t get why you can’t just leave it for once and enjoy yourself. You did it in Europe, you always do it when we travel. You do it in interviews.”

“But that’s not me. What do you want, you want me to act in private the way I do in front of some stranger who wants to write about my—about our life?” 

“Of course not. You know that’s not what I mean. I just…you’ve been pissed off at me for what feels like years, and I just think enough is enough.”

Zach is crying in earnest now, hot tears tracking their way down his cheeks. He feels ruined. Forget a sore; there’s a big sucking wound in his chest. He should never have gone to lunch with Jon; he should never have picked up the phone. “So what are you saying?”

“I think when you get back here we should have it out once and for all and then see where we stand when we’re done. Look, we don’t see eye to eye on me being out. You can swear up and down that you don’t care about it that much, like you used to. We can have fight after fight about it and make up a thousand times, but it’s never going to go away. And it’s…it’s not fair, Zach.” There’s a pause, and Zach can hear Chris’s voice get lower, rougher. “I know it’s not fair to you. So here’s my promise, okay? By the time you get back here, I’ll have made a decision. And then…”

“Then that’s it?”

Chris draws a shuddering breath. “Yeah.” He sighs. “I’ve been a dick. A spineless dick, but you already knew that, didn’t you. I’m not going to do it anymore. If I can’t promise to do right by you, I can at least promise you that.”

_You motherfucker,_ Zach wants to scream at him. Anger surges through him; he feels like he could move things with the sheer force of it, a poltergeist rage. 

“You should have done this years ago,” Zach says, “How could you do this to me now, when I thought we were—” His throat closes altogether, and he badly wants to throw the phone, not just hang up on Chris but obliterate him. 

“It’s not enough,” he goes on, shaking his head vociferously, as if Chris can see him. “To say you’ll think about it.” Even as he says the words he knows what he’s doing; he can feel them sinking into his bones, each one a malignant deposit.

“What?” Chris says.

“You’re right that it’s not fair to me. Nothing about this relationship has been fair to me, Chris. I’ve been cutting you slack on it ever since the beginning.” Jon’s words feel strange in his mouth, clipped and clinical, nothing like the raw mess that wants to pour out with them. 

Chris breathes straight down the phone, a burst of TV static. He always does that; it drives Zach crazy. “Listen--” 

“No, you listen. It’s not fucking fair to...to strand me out here while you’re off ruminating on the pros and cons of staying with me. You have to pick now,” Zach says, pacing an erratic circle at the foot of the bed. 

“It’s been three years. After three years you know or you don’t. And if you don’t, then maybe that’s your answer right there.” 

“Don’t do this right now,” Chris says. “Not when you’re so far away, not on the fucking phone.” 

Zach imagines him in the room, holding his hands up like Zach’s something that needs gentling, something that can be coaxed. If he were here it might work.

Zach drags his hand down his face. “I have to,” he says. “Don’t you get it? If I don’t do it now I’m going to wake up one day hating you. It’s starting already, Chris, I felt it at the wedding and I feel it now and it makes me _sick._.”

There’s an awful quiet then. Zach’s head is pounding, the dead weight heft of his heart ferrying waves of pain through his skull with every beat. He can feel his heartbeat in his teeth. 

“I can’t,” Chris says into the silence, voice breaking. “I can’t do it, not right now. I’m sorry.” 

“Fuck!” Zach folds forward, smacking the mattress hard enough to sting. He grabs a big handful of bedding, clenches a fist so hard his fingers feel like they could snap. It hurts. He could punch the wall that hard, exposed brick versus his brittle bones, and that would hurt too. 

“I’m sorry,” Chris is saying again. “I’m sorry, I love you.” He’s not recanting, though. Zach might hope for it, but he knows it isn’t going to happen.

“Fuck you, Chris,” Zach says. “You’re a fucking coward, you know that?” 

Chris sniffs hard. “I know,” he says miserably. “I’m sorry.” 

“Yeah, well. Me too.” Zach looks at the wall again, back down at the peaks and valleys of his knuckles. But the momentum’s gone, and anyway, he hurts badly enough all by himself now.  
They sniffle down the phone at each other for awhile. Out the window, the sun has ducked behind the skyline. “My head really hurts,” Zach says at last. His voice squeaks like a child’s; he feels like there’s something caught in his throat.

“Aw, baby,” Chris says, the word a bruise. “Who’d you even get drunk with, anyway?”

Zach hiccups. “Jon, if you can believe it.”

“Hmm. What was that about? Or, wait, I’m, uh, pretty sure I can guess.”

“Yeah. Jon was fighting the good fight for my virtue.” He crawls back under the covers, stretching. He feels drained. 

“How altruistic.”

“Nah, it’s not like that. He got married. To Pietro; you know, that designer he’s been dating forever.” He’s not trying to sound bitter, but it comes out that way.

Chris exhales. “I’m sorry, Zach.”

“You already said that.”

“I know I did.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Zach says. “So there’s no fucking point.” He rubs his eyes. “I have to go, okay? I’m passing out.” 

“Okay,” Chris says, sounding bereft. “So, that’s just...it?” 

Zach closes his eyes. “Chris--” 

“No, it’s okay.” Chris sounds scattered, shaken. The uncertainty in his tone shouldn’t please Zach as much as it does. But Zach’s not himself, is he? He’s been distilled to his most bilious parts. 

Chris continues. “It’s--um. It’s just, your...your stuff. And Skunk, I’ve still--” 

“Look, I’m here til the end of November. Can we figure it out when I get back? I mean, I could fly back and get Skunk, I guess, or you could call the vet and board him.” 

“Skunk hates the vet,” Chris says. 

Zach feels a wash of guilt. “I know, okay? I’m just trying to think of options.” 

“I’ll keep him,” Chris says. “Until you come back. It’s not a big deal.” 

“Seriously?” 

“It’s fine.” 

Zach sighs. “Thanks,” he says. 

“I don’t want this,” Chris says suddenly. “This is so fucking stupid.” 

Zach curls in on himself. “I don’t want it either. But I don’t see what the alternative is. It’s like you said a minute ago; we’re going to keep having this fight, over and over. And I know how it goes. ‘More time, Zach, more time.’ But I don’t have any left to give you.” 

“I guess that’s it then,” Chris says, his tone clipped. Zach can hear what’s behind it, though. How can two people do this to each other, he wonders. Just sit here and sever things, just like that. He can feel himself pull against the inevitability even now, even as he knows it’s the right thing. Please don’t make me, screams a little voice in his head. Some soft and writhing thing, sightless and scrabbling back towards the warm dark. 

“I’m gonna go,” he whispers. 

“Sure thing,” Chris says, like the surest thing hasn’t just imploded. “I’ll...I’ll keep you posted on the dog.” He sighs. “Bye, Zach.” And then he’s gone. 

_Goodbye_ , Zach thinks. He lets the phone slip out of his hand. He doesn’t bother to put it back on the nightstand; let it get lost in the bed, add a few inches of bunched-up sheet to the thousand or so miles between them. He closes his eyes again, finally, and sleeps the sleep of the wrung out and useless.

***

Zach decides he’s lucky to be shooting the project he is. His character does a lot of brooding in between waiting for his contacts with various nefarious elements, and while Zach is more than capable of leaving his personal life in the trailer when he works, he finds himself grateful to at least have an upside to this disaster with Chris, something he can claim for his own and make productive instead of just some grey and lumpen thing, heavy in his gut wherever he goes.

Jon’s been hovering like a nervous fairy godmother; Zach was unforthcoming about exactly what transpired between him and Chris the day they went to lunch, but he gets the feeling that it’s a damning with faint praise kind of situation. He’s managed to beg off several offers of dinner chez Jon and Pietro. It’s not that Zach bears them any specific ill will; it’s just weird as hell, not to mention the fact that watching a pair of newlyweds putter around their newly outfitted Soho kitchen feels like Zach’s own personal hell these days.

Even so, he finds himself over at their place on Halloween. For better or worse, leaning heavily towards worse. For one, he’s found it nigh impossible to summon enough of a fuck to give about the holiday to put together any kind of costume. The day itself is a long one, and by the time Zach’s dragged himself home and showered the only thing he can handle is black clothes and eyeliner. After he gets ready, he leans against the kitchen counter with a beer and scrolls through his phone. Three texts have materialized while he was getting dressed. One is from Jesse, asking about the party. One is from Joe; a picture of his kids in their costumes. And the third is from Katie Pine.

_Hi Zach. Just wondering if you’d talked to C lately. Let me know._

Great. Trust Chris to pull his disappearing act now, when the last thing Zach wants to do is try and pin him down. He’s trying to spend his days with Chris as far from his mind as possible; the feelings surrounding the whole situation have been fertile ground for work, but the man himself…well, Zach’s been getting a lot of mileage out of pretending he doesn’t exist outside of their periodic conversations. It’s been a week; Chris has sent him a couple of emails, practical questions about bills and a problem with Zach’s car, and he’s texted a few cute pictures of Skunk, but that’s it.

He dials Chris with a sigh. Predictably, the call goes to voicemail. Zach’s not sure what that’s about, if Chris is ensconced in his office writing with the phone on mute or if he’s out auditioning replacements. He dwells on this last option in his darker moments; they’re always women, always lithe and blonde. They’ll be a matched set; Chris will knock her up by accident and they’ll have a blushing shotgun wedding and a million beautiful children and Zach will get a letterpress invitation in the mail and he will burn that invitation in the fireplace.

_Hey, you’ve reached Chris. I can’t come to the phone right now._

“Hi,” Zach says at the tone. “Uh, happy Halloween. I’m just calling because I got a text from your sister. You should get in touch, she sounds worried. Okay, bye.”

He hangs up just as Jesse buzzes up from the lobby. “Hey,” Zach says. “Hold on, I’m coming right down.”

“Lame,” Jesse says when he sees Zach’s non-costume. He’s dressed as the Hamburgler and looks creepy as fuck.

“You should’ve been Ronald McDonald,” Zach says.

“Fuck off. What are you billing yourself as? Because you’ve gotta come up with some bullshit, they enforce a costume-only policy at this shindig.”

“You’re kidding,” Zach says. “God, that’s so twee and obnoxious.”

“Jon is married to the next Marc Jacobs,” Jesse says. “Their lives are twee and obnoxious. You should see some of the sketches for their wedding suits. Two words: matching plaid.”

Zach rolls his eyes. It feels disturbingly good to be this bitchy, like a muscle that doesn’t get worked nearly enough. “Jesus fucking Christ. Fine, I’m existential malaise.”

Jesse bumps Zach’s shoulder with his own. “Sounds about right.”

“Oh god,” Zach says as they walk out onto the street. “Don’t you start.”

“Hey, I’m not starting anything. I’m just going on record as saying that if you want to talk—”

“I do not want to talk.”

“--I’m here for you.”

Zach picks up his pace so Jesse has to hustle to catch up. “Be here for getting my brokenhearted ass to this party and getting me drunk,” he calls back over his shoulder.

“God, are you forty, Quinto? That is so fucking sad.”

Jesse’s right about Jon’s door policy; the couple that show up before them, while dressed very fashionably indeed, are turned away for not being in costume.

“Go put on some cat ears and then come talk to me,” Jon calls after them. “This is Halloween, motherfuckers.” He eyes Jesse approvingly and raises his eyebrow at Zach. “This has half-assed written all over it,” he says.

“Come on, I’m existential malaise,” Zach says.

“Cut the man some slack,” Jesse says. “He’s heartbroke.”

Jon waves them in, introducing them to the illustrious Pietro, who’s mixing a bonafide cauldron of drinks in the kitchen from behind a smokescreen of dry ice. Zach bypasses the mystery brew and pours himself a vodka rocks, with a twist of lime because he’s just that classy.

“Yikes,” Jesse says.

Zach takes a generous sip, then another. He drains the glass and pours himself a second. “Don’t judge me,” he says. Then he stalks past Jesse into the living room, dark and smoky and lit with pulsing purple and orange strobes.

Zach has to hand it to Jon and Pietro; the place looks great, draped with spiderwebs and skeletons propped in corners. He’s always appreciated a good theme party, and once upon a time Halloween had been his favorite holiday. Back in high school he’d put together something Margo-appropriate and ditch it as soon as he got out of the house, offering himself up to his girl friends’ makeup collections, sitting in their pink bathrooms on the closed toilet seat with admonitions to keep his eyes closed. He’d always relished that first look in the mirror, smokey-eyed and beglittered and new. Most people tried on other identities at Halloween; Zach had always felt like a slightly better version of himself.

“Thriller” comes to a close and the next song starts up, something boringly au courant, crunchy bass and a high female vocal Zach can’t make out, clearly chosen based on a loose application of the party’s theme. It’s sexy music, anyway, and it makes Zach want to dance. He moves out onto the floor into the crush of bodies, and immediately the temperature in the room goes up at least five degrees. Zach feels sweat begin to bead on his face about two minutes in, but it’s dark, and even if people could see they wouldn’t care.

He dances with himself for a song or two before he notices someone watching him. Or, rather, he notices someone hovering nearby; the lights are so low that it’s impossible to tell where he’s actually looking. That and the fact that the guy’s wearing a full face of makeup, hollow dark eyes and dark mouth looming from a gleaming white skull. He’s dressed in a getup that would be ridiculous if he wasn’t so hot: a suit to match his skeletal face, tight and black but for an anatomical assembly of bones.

Zach has made it most of the way through his second drink by now, and he’s just drunk enough to find the situation—being stalked on a dance floor by a living skeleton—both horrifying and abjectly hilarious. He goes over to the skeleton and pokes him in the greater trochanter.

“What’s your deal, man?”

The skeleton shrugs, leaning over close to speak into Zach’s ear. “I like what I see,” he says. A shiver runs the length of Zach’s spine.

Zach swallows. “Oh yeah?” He looks up into the skeleton’s face, trying to discern some hint of the man behind the greasepaint.

The skeleton nods. Then he slowly moves to rest his hands on Zach’s hips. Zach thinks vaguely that he should protest, but instead he lets himself be guided into a dance, sinuous and writhing in time to the music. He imagines the picture they must make, black-clad, at least one of them haunted. The skeleton reaches up and tips Zach’s chin back; Zach tries to jerk his head away and is rewarded with a resilient thumb digging into his cheek for his troubles. Zach looks into the gaping black eyes and kisses the pad of that thumb, thinking that at least it’s pink and fleshy, at least it’s alive.

_Not here_ Zach thinks, and the skeleton mutters something as if in reply. He backs Zach into an unlit hallway, up against the wall, shaking with the beat of the music. Zach’s teeth rattle with it too, and he bites the inside of his cheek to still them. The skeleton rests his hands on either side of Zach’s head and leans in to kiss his neck. Zach cries out at the contact, at the wild thought that this man is going to tear his throat out right here in Jon’s hallway. He doesn’t though, just moves across to Zach’s mouth to claim it with a deep, biting kiss, dark and thick with the smell of wine. Zach feels a hand brush the length of his inner thigh from his knee to his dick, nails running over the seam of his jeans, and suddenly he knows with absolute certainty just how fucking good it would feel to be taken here against this wall with the rush of the party just feet away, to zip up afterwards and go straight back onto the dance floor, through the living room to the kitchen to hassle Jon about the dry ice punch. To go find the rest of his sad forty-year-old cohort and do some sad, nigh-middle-aged lines off the back of Jon and Pietro’s four thousand dollar toilet.

The hand presses against the crotch of Zach’s jeans. “I can’t,” Zach says.

The skeleton is panting in his ear, the weight of his body leaden-seeming over Zach. He doesn’t reply.

“I can’t,” Zach says again. “I’ve got—there’s someone—” 

But there isn’t, not really. And the skeleton doesn’t stop, and Zach doesn’t move. The hand cups him through denim, and when fingers find the button at the top of his fly Zach is preoccupied, moaning into the skeleton’s mouth. He lets himself be caught around the shoulders and spun around, cheek mashed against the wallpaper, a hand down the front of his jeans. 

“Come on,” he says, pulse racing.

He braces himself against the wall with one arm and yanks one side of his pants down, the skeleton’s spidery hand on his waist, clasping at his hip. Zach’s hard when the air hits his skin. The music is so loud; they won’t be able to hear anybody coming. 

He hears a wet hack, and a second later there’s a warm smear of spit at his hole. When the skeleton’s fingers push inside the pain makes Zach sigh against the wall. His face feels strange, the muscles in his cheeks tense and twitchy. He slides his tongue over his teeth and realizes he’s smiling.

“Come on,” he says. “Fucking do it.” 

“Shh,” comes the reply against his ear. Zach hears the metallic crinkle of a condom wrapper. The skeleton wraps an arm around Zach’s waist and heaves, lifting him up, compressing his diaphragm and letting Zach gasp ineffectually against the pressure like a landed fish. His jeans are down around his knees now, and there’s something blunt and far too big sliding between his thighs. Too low at first, but that’s by design, because Zach has no sooner coughed out an entreaty to let up than he slips down lower and feels a fist butt up against his ass, guiding the man’s dick up to his hole. 

There’s a rasp of teeth against his neck and a simultaneous burst of pain far worse than before. Zach thinks he must shout; his mouth opens wide enough for it, but the sound is sucked away by the persistent thump of the music. The pain shoots through him and coils up to match the ache in his chest like a long-lost twin, and it feels so right to Zach that he lets out a sob of relief. 

“Fuck me,” he bites out. “Please.” More pliant than he means to be, certainly, but he can’t pass this up; he feels like he’s met himself here in this hallway, like the universe has taken pity on the stain of a person he is tonight and spit out a partner to match. 

The next thrust sends Zach sliding back up the wall again. Whoever this guy is, Zach thinks hysterically, he’s pretty fucking strong, because he’s practically holding Zach up on his dick, letting the wall take the balance of his weight. Zach turns his head to try and get a better look, but the skeleton just uses his free hand to shove Zach’s face back with lip-splitting force, a coppery splatter onto the wallpaper. He leaves his hand there, fingers tightening in Zach’s hair, spasming as he drives into him relentlessly. Zach lets himself drift, mouth open and drooling blood. He wants to laugh; he can feel it bubbling up inside him like his orgasm. He reaches down to jerk himself, half-surprised to find himself so close. He comes giggling limply against the wall, turning his face in to kiss it, leave a smear of macabre lipstick for the newlyweds to puzzle over in the morning. 

The skeleton yanks him up by the waist again, and Zach grabs his arm reflexively and pries at it, his breathing too shallow for the way his heart’s pounding. He drives up into Zach once more, flattening him against the wall and shuddering against him. He smells like smoke and a sweetish cologne and it makes Zach’s mouth water like he’s going to throw up. 

They stay like that for a moment, Zach crawling with the need to move, to get away. Then the skeleton slips out of him deftly, pulling Zach’s jeans back up. He grips Zach by the shoulder and turns him again, pressing his thumb painfully into Zach’s mangled lip. Zach jerks his face away and the guy just stares at him; and for a second Zach thinks he recognizes him, something that flashes in his eyes and then disappears. Zach shrugs him off and swallows a mouthful of bloody spit. He tucks himself back into his briefs and buttons his fly, and then he’s walking quickly back down the hall towards the light of the kitchen. He doesn’t risk a look back; he gets the feeling that’s the stuff of nightmares. 

In the kitchen, Jesse and Jon are holding icing bags, leaning over a tray of orange sugar cookies which they appear to be decorating. There are a couple of decent-looking jack-o-lanterns on the tray already. There’s also one with a clumsily rendered dick in its mouth.

“Nice, you guys,” Zach says, as he steps out of the shadows like a ghoul.

Jesse starts and looks up, his Hamburgler eye mask slightly askew. “What the fuck happened to your face?”

Zach looks at himself in the mirror hanging over the sink. Black makeup is smeared across his nose and cheeks. His mouth looks terrible, though the greasepaint has mingled with the worst of the blood. He wipes his lip with the back of his hand. He has no idea where his drink got to.

“Nothing happened,” he says. “Can I have some water?” 

Jon nods, straightening and making his way over to the fridge. He hands Zach a chilled bottle, and Zach doesn’t even have the wherewithal to give him shit about the plastic. He lifts the bottle to his face; feeling suddenly too hot.

“You okay?” Jon says. He’s staring at Zach’s lip; Zach can see him trying to decide whether or not to press him on it.

Zach shakes his head. “I…I think I’ve gotta go.”

“We just got here, though,” Jesse says. “Here, clean that shit off your face and come help us ice these. No more dick pumpkins, I promise. We’ll be good.”

“I can’t,” Zach says. “I’m going home.”

Jon steps closer to him, searching his face. “You sure you’re okay? Is this about—”

“It’s not about Chris. I’m just…I’m not feeling it tonight. I need some air, and I need to not be here. I’m sorry,” he adds as an afterthought.

Jon opens his mouth as if to say something more, but before he can get the words out Zach’s turning around and working his way back towards the front door. As he goes he can see the couple who got kicked out before; they’ve procured devil horns and a pointy hat and appear significantly drunker. They smile at him and clap him on the shoulder as he passes, but the touches feel light as ghosts.

He walks home, looking behind him every few minutes like he expects the skeleton man to be tailing him, to haul him into an alley. But of course it never happens; he just drags on alone until he gets back to his building. He leans against the wall in the elevator and contemplates his fuzzy reflection in the metal door opposite; eyes so dark and distorted they look like empty sockets themselves.

Undressed in the bathroom he leans over the toilet and neatly pukes up the vodka that’s been threatening to come back up since he left the party. It’s medicinal, he decides. He feels numb, his extremities cold, though at the core of him is a sick and burgeoning panic.

He runs the shower and soaps himself up three separate times, reaching back and prodding gingerly at his hole. He washes his face twice after he gets out of the shower, drags a fancy acid toner pad over his skin. He has a pimple brewing at his jawline and a spray of clogged pores in his nose. If Chris were here Zach would whine to him about them and be treated to a twenty-minute soliloquy on the horrors of Accutane and essentially told to shut the fuck up about his lone whitehead, thanks very much. He smiles down into the sink.

Grinning manically at the porcelain, his busted lip stinging, he recalls Katie’s text. _C’mon, Chris,_ he thinks, going into the bedroom and fishing through the pockets of his wadded black jeans. _Pick up your damn phone._ As he dials, he realizes he has no idea what he’ll say if Chris answers. 

Hi, I don’t recognize myself in the mirror, how are you.

_Hey, you’ve reached Chris. I can’t—_

He throws the phone onto the bed, lying down next to it and curling onto his side. The panic is beginning to ebb and he starts to shiver as if it’s working its way out of his body that way. He lies that way, still but for the shaking, until he falls asleep. When he wakes up his phone’s lost in the sheets again and his eyelashes are tacky with salt.

***

Zach’s wakeup call the next morning comes courtesy of Jesse, far too early.

“What the hell happened to you last night? I saw your face, man, so don’t think you can play this shit off right now.”

“Hold on a second, will you?” Zach groans. 

He hurts all over, particularly the aforementioned face. Fuck, makeup’s going to kill him. He stumbles out of bed still clutching the phone and goes into the bathroom, leaning over the sink and dabbing a washcloth on his mouth. His lip starts to ooze blood again, the smell and taste turning his stomach. He grimaces. 

“Hello?” Jesse says over the line. 

“Yeah.” 

“Well? Spit it out. What were you up to last night? You tore out of Jon’s like a bat out of hell.” 

Zach barks a laugh.

_“What?”_ Jesse says. 

“Ugh,” says Zach, rubbing his eyes. “You really wanna know?” 

“Look, as a friend--” 

“Oh my god, stop with the concerned friend bit and just admit you have a prurient interest in this shit.” 

Jesse sniffs. “Whatever.” 

“You want to know what I did last night? I got fucked up against the wall in Jon and Pietro’s hallway by a dude in a full body spandex skeleton costume.” 

There’s a long pause, followed by a sound that might be Jesse laughing or might be a dying cat. Zach frowns into the mirror and waits for Jesse to get his shit together. 

“Okay,” Jesse says finally. “Okay. Just. I. Oh my god, Zach. Oh my--how did he even get his dick out?” 

Zach can’t not crack a smile at that. For his troubles, he gets a fresh bead of blood welling up in the middle of his lip. “Ow,” he says, wincing. “You know, I have no fucking idea.” 

“And did he, like, have some kind of secret condom pocket? Hey, is this a thing now with you? Are you cruising these days? Because I know you were all ready for the picket fence routine with Christopher Whitelaw, but I feel like this is _kind_ of a dramatic swing in the opposite direction.” 

Zach’s throat clenches at the mention of Chris. “Fuck, I don’t know, man. It was Halloween. I was fucking around. I was--” He takes a breath. “I think I’m kind of fucked up right now, Jesse.” 

Jesse sighs down the line, but it’s a measured sound, nothing like Chris and his cluelessly inconsiderate roar. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s not exactly subtle.” 

“Fuck off,” Zach says sadly. 

“Zach, look, maybe--” 

Zach shakes his head. “I feel like shit,” he says. “I need to go back to bed; I’m shooting tonight.” He’s not, but fuck it. 

Jesse sighs again. “Fine. But just--don’t let it fester for too long, okay? Bitter’s not a great look on you.” 

_It was a good enough look last night,_ Zach thinks. 

“It’s fine,” he says. “I’m fine. I just need to get back out there, or whatever. You know?”  
It sounds like hell, frankly. Zach doesn’t know whether that makes it more or less appealing.

***

_Call your sister._

_okay_

_dude, seriously, call her. She’s blowing up my phone over here._

_OKAY_

Zach growls at his phone and shoves it into his pocket. In the mirror, Wendi the makeup artist meets his eye and gives him a knowing sort of look. Zach should maybe feel bolstered by this moment of human connection, but he just wants her to mind her own fucking business.

“Can you relax your face?” she says tersely. “This bruise is cracking.”

Zach’s split lip is healing, a fact he finds mildly disappointing. His makeup is perfect for his mood, though, and at the end of the day Zach is tempted to leave it on and wander the evening streets with his face a horror. He snaps a self portrait in his trailer and deems it too grim for the Internet. Zach’s character is miserable, his money gone, his life a joke and nearly forfeit, and Zach is happy to let himself drown in it for the time being. 

They shoot the final episode of Black Road a few days before Thanksgiving. Everybody’s very complimentary about his performance, about how great it’s been to work with him, but frankly Zach thinks it’s a complete miracle that he hasn’t been given a serious chewing out for his attitude, at the very least. He’s been snappish and distracted, eyes on his phone more often than not, declining invitations to hang out with the rest of the cast and crew after hours. Not that it’s a requirement, but gelling with cast mates has always been a massive perk of this job for someone as social as Zach. Or maybe he’s not that social anymore—he doesn’t know. All he knows is that when he’s done for the day all he wants to do is go home; it seems like far too much work to drag himself out with people if all he’s going to do is sit there staring, pretending to follow the conversation while he tries and fails not to obsess over Chris.

“You’re so boring right now, man,” Jesse says. He elbows Jon, who’s sitting next to him in a cozy booth, pressed up against Pietro on the other side. “Isn’t he so boring?” 

“Be nice,” Jon says, eyes on the dregs of Zach’s drink. 

“I’m empty,” Zach says by way of an answer, smacking the table with his palm and sliding out of the booth. “Anybody want anything?” 

Pietro holds up his own empty tumbler. Zach catches a flurry of movement under the table, which is probably Jon kicking him as punishment for enabling Zach’s return to the bar.  
“G and T, right?” 

Pietro nods. 

“You got it,” Zach says, glowering at Jon. As he turns on his heel and walks away he can hear Jon start in on Pietro and Jesse.

There’s a wait at the bar, and as he stands there with the wood edge pressed up against his belly he feels somebody slide up next to him, the warm length of an arm against his. He looks out of the corner of his eye and then turns his head altogether. The man he sees is young, with a longish shock of blond hair falling into his eyes. He shoves it back out of the way without much success and smiles at Zach. His throat is long like a swan’s, Zach thinks.

“Hey,” he says. “You been waiting here long?” 

Zach smiles back, sidelong. “Long enough to think about finding another place to get a drink.”  
“Sounds like a good idea.” He nods at the bartender. “This guy looks slammed.” 

“I told my friend I’d get him a refill, though. So.” 

The man’s eyes drift to Zach’s mouth. “Too bad.” 

He bites his lip and smiles, and his blue eyes widen, and they’re rainwater, or cornflower, and Zach hates himself for knowing so many goddamn synonyms for blue. He read once that blue eyes aren’t actually blue at all, that it’s all a physicist’s party trick, but tell that to Zach’s clasping and insistent brain. 

“You know,” Zach says. “I think he can live without another gin and tonic.” 

When they get out of the bar they’re all over each other, Zach catching the man about the lapels and getting up into his personal space, lips at his jaw and his neck. “I’m Lucas,” the man says, laughing. Zach has the impulse to make something up, but he’s not sure what the point would be. 

“Zach,” he says. “Where’s your place?” 

“Mmm,” says Lucas, eyes narrowing, but if Zach’s name confirms anything for him he doesn’t say. “Around the corner.” 

Lucas lives in a cramped studio with a curtain dividing it in two for the roommate who’s blessedly absent. There’s a kitchenette at the foot of the bed and Zach kicks the stove by mistake when he sprawls on top of Lucas on the rumpled sheets. 

“Sorry,” he mutters, struggling blindly out of his boots. 

“I’m sorry,” Lucas says. “This place is...I don’t know. It’s fucking freezing in here; my landlord won’t turn the heat on.” 

“Let’s get you warmed up then,” Zach says, and Lucas doesn’t even cringe at the line. 

He’s so young. Zach doesn’t think he remembers being that young. He lets his vision blur as he moves over his body on the bed, strips him down and watches as he gasps at the cold, muscles tensing, nipples hardening. He’s hare-trigger responsive, and that, Zach remembers. The way the air felt charged with sex some nights, the men he’d smile at in bars, the way their answering grin felt like victory. All those nights. But Lucas is fair-haired and those damn blue eyes and Zach remembers the first night, how could he not, Chris laid out before him like this, not chronologically this young but the way he’d moved and gasped and smiled up at Zach like he was the fucking second coming--all those things are the same. 

_“Um, you can proceed.”_

_Zach’s hand tightens on a handful of Chris’s thigh. “Just--just shut up, Pine. I’m--”_

_“You’re...waiting for an engraved invitation? Calculating pi to fifteen digits? Reciting the Lord’s Prayer?”_

_“Maybe that last one,” Zach says. He swallows._

_Chris giggles, tilting his head back on the pillow. Zach watches the pulse at his throat and feels like he should probably be breathing into a paper bag right now._

_“I’m not gonna break,” Chris says._

__I might,_ Zach thinks. _

__

“Hey,” Lucas says. “You okay?” 

Zach blinks back to reality. It’s really fucking cold in this apartment. 

“Yeah,” he says. He’s got his hand around both of them, Lucas chasing after more, his hips making jerky little movements up off the bed. “How do you want it?” Zach asks. 

“Like this,” Lucas says. “You’re hot, I wanna look at you.” He cranes that cygnine neck back and Zach can see his pulse beat time and--

“No,” Zach says. “Turn over.”

***

After a hiatus, Chris starts calling Zach at odd hours, practical matters slowly seguing into strange questions that leave him wondering if he’s trying to put together some sort of natural history of their relationship. He wonders what that would look like, anyway. A fucking mess, probably, and he shouldn’t indulge it. But he’s always been regrettably weak where Chris was concerned, and talking to him soothes the raw place that seems to live in Zach these days.

“Do you…do you want kids?” Chris asks one night, on the heels of a conversation about the merits of a grocery delivery service he has apparently been using. Why he’s not just going to the grocery store himself is a question that goes unasked and thus unanswered, but Zach figures he has his reasons.

“Do you have some kind of checklist working?”

“No, just…do you?”

Zach bites his lip, considering. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Oh.”

“Why, do you?”

“I…I don’t know either,” Chris says. There’s something there, something hovering just behind the words. If Zach was there with him, maybe he could figure out what it is, but he’s not. “I thought you would,” Chris says.

Zach smiles sadly at the phone. “Why, because I was always the big proponent of domestic bliss in this relationship?”

“Maybe,” Chris says.

The strangest thing about this situation is that, through all of it, the person Zach most wants to talk to is Chris. Even when he’s trying to forget Chris exists, even when he swears up and down to himself that he’s better off, that he’d be even _better_ off if they never speak again. If somewhere down the line Zach does get cordially invited to the nuptials of Christopher W. Pine and someone far, far better suited to his particular brand of movie star.

“I don’t know,” Zach says again. “It’s…attractive in the abstract, I guess. In practice…it’s a lot. Right? I mean it would have to be with…with the right person.” He shakes his head. “Why are we talking about this?” 

“I don’t know,” Chris says heavily. 

“Are you going to your parents’ for Thanksgiving?” Zach asks.

“I haven’t talked to them about it,” Chris says, his voice clipped. “I might just stay here.” 

“Sounds kind of depressing,” Zach says. Knee-jerk and careless, but fuck it, it’s true.

“Whatever, Zach,” Chris says. He sighs. “We need to figure out what’s going on with the house,” he says. “With all your shit.” 

“Yeah,” Zach says. “I was...I was going to look for somewhere,” he says. “But it’s hard to do remotely, you know?” Discussing the logistics of their disentanglement is horrifying to Zach, even more so than the emotional bludgeon that was discussing children. Christ, people do this with kids; how the fuck does that work. 

“Forget it,” Chris says. “It’s fine. It’s just kind of hard--but no, we can talk about it when you’re ho—when you’re back.”

They’re silent for a long time, the words refusing to dissipate. A few more seconds of this and Chris will hang up, and the next time Zach sees him will be the last time. “How’s Skunk?” Zach asks, hoping he sounds less desperate than he feels. 

“He’s great,” says Chris, too quickly. “He was doing that thing he does, like with the aggressive dreaming? It was really cute. Next time I’ll see if I can figure out how to take a video on my phone.” 

“Good luck with that,” Zach says, and Chris’s answering dubious snort is the best and worst thing he’s ever heard.

***

After his town car pulls away, Zach stands in Chris’s driveway for a good five minutes before he can bring himself to go up to the door. _Get it together,_ he says to himself. But he can’t shake the feeling of cliff diving, the edge just feet away and the drop far too far down. It’s early evening and the houselights have winked on over the course of Zach’s drive from the airport. Chris’s house, though, remains dark. As Zach stands there in the growing twilight, he begins to feel as if he isn’t really here at all, as if maybe he never was here. As if he could turn around and go back to the airport, and no one would be the wiser.

Then the lights come on, back in the house first and then outside. He belonged here once, didn’t he? His clothes are still in the closet and his toothbrush is in the bathroom and his dog is starting a ruckus behind the front door, having intuited Zach’s presence via some canine telepathy.

Zach goes up to the door and rings the bell, two short one long, and as he does he can hear Skunk’s conservatively-spaced investigative barks break down into a flurry of excited chaos.

“Okay, okay, hold your horses, buddy,” says Chris’s voice. Zach’s heart swells in spite of itself. The door opens, Chris insinuating a leg between the lunging blur of Skunk and the open door. He looks down concernedly at the dog and then slowly up at Zach. In the second or two it takes for his gaze to shift, Zach swears his heart turns over altogether. Their eyes meet, and Chris smiles, slow and sleepy like they’re waking up together, just like always. Then Zach’s inside, in Chris’s arms. He’s not sure of the exact logistics, or how they’ve managed to contain the jubilant Skunk, or how it’s possible that he’s indulging this terrible idea.

Chris grabs hold of Zach, kissing him and kissing him, both hands cupping Zach’s face. Zach’s shoulder bag slides off his arm and lands at his feet with a solid thunk. He tries to move closer, to hold Chris tighter, but as he does Chris pulls away, drawing a gasping breath. He gathers Zach up sideways, and Zach can feel breath at his temple, the press of Chris’s lips.

“Your weird-ass hugs, Pine,” Zach says. 

When Chris straightens again he swipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand. Zach can get a good look at him then, and what he sees makes him suck in a breath. Chris’s face looks fuller, but the hollows beneath his eyes are deep and dark, as if pressed concave with charcoal-smudged thumbs. His lips are dry and cracked, and there’s the livid line of a cut in the center of the lower. Chris’s tongue darts out over it as if he can hear Zach’s thoughts.

“Are you…okay?” Zach asks carefully.

“Yeah,” Chris says. He steps back, waving Zach into the foyer. “Come on, aren’t you hungry? I ordered in Thai.”

He turns, and the way he moves down the hall seems wrong to Zach somehow, the set of his body, his center of gravity. But maybe not, Zach thinks, maybe just a wrong-footed step or a slip on the tile. He’s wearing socks, after all. It’s not late, but Chris has the look of someone in for the night, clad in an oversized grey hooded sweatshirt and an ancient pair of sweatpants with a faded “Cal” on the right hip, the ones Chris never wears because the elastic is shot and they don’t stay on.

“You look so comfy,” Zach says. 

“Huh? Oh. I, uh, I was cold earlier,” Chris says, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Hey,” Zach says, reaching out and snagging a fold of Chris’s sleeve with the crook of his index finger.

Chris looks back at him. “Hmm?”

“We going to talk about it?” Zach asks. “Or just--” 

Chris smiles sadly, looks down at the floor. “Um, you...you should stay here tonight,” he says. “If you want to.” He worries at his lower lip; Zach can see how he got that cut now. He wonders how long it’s been festering, Chris refusing to let the edges knit. 

“You think that’s a good idea?” 

“Not really.” 

And god, it’s really, really not. Zach’s bag is still sitting over by the door, Skunk sniffing it methodically. Zach wonders how long it would take the car service to turn around and come back. He would rather die than leave this house, he thinks.

Chris reaches out then and catches hold of Zach’s arm. His fingers dig in, and Zach jerks in Chris’s grip. “You’re hurting me,” Zach says quietly.

“I know,” Chris says miserably, but he doesn’t let go. He looks lost, like a kid, and it makes Zach angry all over again even as it makes him want to go to his knees and take it all back, to promise Chris all the time in the world. Miserable and in love. Jon was right.

Zach looks at Chris’s hand on his arm for a moment. His grip still feels like a vise. Zach shrugs away and Chris drops his arm immediately, looking abashed. Zach sighs. He’s never felt so tired.

“I’ll stay,” he says. “For tonight.” 

Chris visibly relaxes. 

“Let’s just eat,” Zach says. “You wanted to eat.”

They eat at the kitchen counter, perched on the barstools. Zach picks at his food. Chris demolishes a whole plate of noodles and half the chicken satay, and looks longingly at the rest until Zach pushes it over to him without a word.

“Thanks,” Chris says. “I’m fucking starving all the time lately.”

“How’s writing going?” Zach asks. Because it’s easy, being here with Chris; he can feel the machinery clicking into place, wheels starting to turn again. He’ll regret this later, he knows he will. But right now it feels so good, like realizing a headache’s gone.

Chris shoves a piece of chicken into his mouth and chews thoughtfully. He’s looking at Zach, and Zach thinks he must feel it too, the pull of it, of them. “Okay,” he says after he swallows. “I think. Slow.”

“Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Like pulling teeth, slaving over your typewriter, pounding medicinal whiskey?”

Chris rolls his eyes. “Something like that. I think it’s more about staring at your cursor and swearing.”

Zach hasn’t written much, not since leaving the land of the analytical essay. He’s tried his hand at it, but mostly he thinks he’s better off interpreting someone else’s words. “Do you miss working?” he asks.

Chris shrugs. “Sometimes? I’m not sure how much, you know? I think I miss the people most, like the buzz of being on set. Which is weird; that’s like the the last thing I thought I’d miss.” He takes a sip of water. “My agent’s getting kind of antsy. I think she’s been doing some poking around on the sly, hoping to seduce me back.”

“Would it work?”

Chris shrugs. “I don’t know. The right project might. Not for…not for a little bit, though. I need to make some more headway on this thing.” He gestures back towards the office, where Zach knows his irksome laptop sits.

Zach pushes a stray broccoli stalk around his plate. “Would you let me read some?”

Chris looks up sharply, like he wasn’t expecting the question. He smiles a little nervously, and Zach knows he wants to say no.

“It’s okay,” he says, preemptively. “I get it.”

“Thanks,” Chris says. “It’s not personal. You know that, right?”

Zach stabs the broccoli with his fork and takes a neat bite. “Of course.”

After dinner is when the strangeness begins to creep back in, the awkward way they move around each other. Zach can’t stop thinking about kissing Chris again, seized by the sudden need to taste something else besides Thai noodles and the sourness that’s clung to his gums since Halloween.

He comes up behind Chris at the sink, where he’s scraping plates into the disposal. Chris stiffens when Zach slips a hand under his waistband, squeezing Chris’s ass in a proprietary way he hasn’t allowed himself to think about in a very long time. “Let me take you to bed,” he says. “Please.”

Chris turns carefully, taking hold of Zach’s hands and clasping them at his chest. He moves to kiss Zach, and as he does he’s nodding. “Lemme finish up here and shower and stuff, okay?”

Zach swallows a pang of disappointment. “Sure,” he says. “Take your time.” 

Chris turns back to the sink, and Zach decides he could probably stand a shower himself.

Under the hard, hot spray he plays with himself, just a tease on the cusp of the real thing. When he gets out, Chris is still clattering around in the kitchen. Zach’s not about to go sit out there like a loser, so he pulls on a pair of boxers and climbs desultorily into bed to read. But it’s not long before the day catches up with him and he’s nodding off, his tablet sliding off to the side. He has the vague thought he should turn it off so the battery doesn’t die, but he can’t make himself do anything but lie back against the cool cotton of the pillow and drift off.

Zach wakes to the light going off, the mattress dipping under Chris’s weight as he climbs into bed. Zach rolls over to face him, blinking sleepily. “You never came,” he says.

“Shh,” Chris says. “Move over.” He pushes at Zach’s shoulder and Zach shifts onto his back, closing his eyes again. He expects Chris to move in close to sleep, but instead he runs a hand over Zach’s belly, dipping into the waistband of his boxers and working them off around Zach’s hips.

“What’re you doing?” Zach tries to look down at Chris, but he can’t see him in the dark.

“Shh,” Chris says again. “Let me.”

Zach sighs, letting Chris drag his boxers off, his legs falling open. He can smell Chris, feel the heat of his body. Chris throws the covers off and Zach moans in protest at the shock of cold. He’s distracted in short order by the weighty drape of Chris’s arm across his midsection, casually pinning him to the bed.

“Mmm,” Zach hums, squirming against Chris, feeling a pricking discomfort. “Don’t.”

“Okay,” Chris says like he’s talking to himself. He moves his arm, resting his cheek at Zach’s hip instead, mouthing around the crease of his upper thigh. Zach’s dick twitches at the proximity, and he spreads his legs wider in unspoken permission.

“Yeah, I missed this,” Chris says.

Zach expects Chris to suck his dick, but he kisses his way over to Zach’s balls instead, running his tongue over the seam at their center and taking them into his mouth. He licks around beneath them, down to Zach’s hole. Zach’s sleepy brain is beginning to stir fully awake now, torn between the sheer base pleasure of Chris’s actions and irritation at the fact that this is so far from the way Zach wanted the evening to go. Chris runs a hand along the inside of Zach’s thigh, his palm feeling huge and hot, and Zach is reminded of the size of Chris, the way he could just take Zach apart if he wanted to. That in many ways, over the years, he has.

Chris is lapping at him, his tongue rough and wet, the flat of it painting Zach’s skin over and over. He’s teasing; Chris likes nothing more than to undo Zach on the occasions when he sets his mind to it, and he’ll do just that now. Moving and moving in slow strokes, refusing to push. By the time Chris deigns to lay a finger on Zach he’s arching back against the pillow. He’s sweating, having totally forgotten that he’d been cold. Chris’s beard rasps against his thighs. He’s going to have a burn from it tomorrow, a spray of stinging pink that’ll show through the hair there and remind him that this happened.

“Fuck you,” he says to Chris through gritted teeth. _Fuck you for letting me leave you._

Zach can hear the plasticky sound of a bottle top being flipped open, and a second later Chris’s fingers are slick and cool and circling his hole. Chris doesn’t bother to build him up, which is fine with Zach, because it means he gets to skip to the part where Chris has three fingers buried in him and his mouth plastered to the inside of Zach’s knee, which might as well be Zach’s lips for the way the wet heat makes him cry out and tangle his fingers in Chris’s hair.

“Not gonna fuck you,” Chris mutters. “I’m going to make you come just like this.”

Zach makes an anguished noise. “I love your hands,” he says. “Chris, please, it feels so good—”

Chris groans, twisting his fingers, and Zach cries out again. He wraps his own hand around his dick, running a thumb over the head. He looks up, his eyes having adjusted to the low light. Chris has his head pillowed on Zach’s thigh and is watching him, a rapt expression on his face. Zach lets his mouth fall open and jerks himself faster, in messy time to Chris’s thrusts. When he drops off over the edge and comes in long spurts over his belly, Chris smiles like he’s won the lottery, and even diminished by the gloom the look is gutting.

Chris cleans Zach off with his tongue. Zach would normally be a little disgusted by it, but now he just watches with his heart in his throat. Chris’s head is a dark smudge: mostly shadow, mostly sensation. Chris sucks at the head of Zach’s softening dick until Zach moans for him to stop.

“Let me do you,” Zach says, trying to sit up.

“Uh, not a problem,” Chris says. “I might’ve—”

“Wait, really?”

“You’re fucking hot when you’re like that,” Chris says, sounding slightly bashful. He flops next to Zach. Zach gropes for his body and Chris catches his hand, brings it up to his chest. They lie there this way for awhile, listening to the night. Zach means to speak, to say something to Chris, but he falls asleep before he can come up with the words. 

In the middle of the night, Zach feels the mattress shift again, and dimly registers the light in the bathroom coming on. He wakes again some hazy amount of time later to find Chris’s side of the bed empty, but he feels too sleep-addled to care. He thrusts a foot out into the space Chris left and finds the mattress cool.

***

The sum total of the possessions Zach kept at Chris’s fits in two suitcases and a duffle bag, and he isn’t sure whether to be sad or grateful for this fact. Grateful’s probably a better fit, because it limits the number of trips Zach has to make out to the car and back, passing Chris in the living room each time. He hovers next to the couch, chin cupped in a hand and staring at the floor like he’s trying to work out some sort of complex problem. Probably the same problem he’s been puzzling over for the last three years. Zach’s had a proof ready and waiting since day one.

“I guess that’s it,” Zach says after depositing his duffle in the back of the car. Skunk is out front, peeing blithely against his front passenger tire. Chris comes into the doorway, face like thunder. Zach just feels numb this morning, a nice alternative to the slow bleed of the past month. 

“Where are you going?” Chris asks quietly. He sounds muddled, like he’s just woken up.

“I rented a place,” Zach says. He’s got the feeling Chris’s question is wider in scope than that, but right now he’s only got the energy for face value.“Like a corporate apartment kind of thing. Somebody from Paramount hooked me up. I’ve seen pictures, it’s…nice. It’s sterile and shitty.” His face twitches into a rictus.

Chris nods. “You gonna stick around L.A.?”

“For a little while. We have a couple things going into production after the first of the year. Then—“ he shakes his head. “I don’t know. You know how I feel about New York.”

Truth be told, Zach’s not actually sure how he feels about New York right now, but the alternative is staying here and attempting to construct a life that’s not intrinsically linked to Chris, and the thought of doing that is repulsive. So, he’ll go and live in his expensive modern shoebox and he’ll go to work and when he’s done he’ll pack up and leave and fly back east and it’ll be like he was never here.

They were always going to be bicoastal, but now that they’re not going to be anything a continent makes for a pretty devastating buffer zone.

“Well,” Chris says, staring down at the driveway gravel. “I guess—”

“So, yeah,” Zach says. “I’ll, um. I’ll just…go.”

Chris opens his mouth as if to protest, and Zach has the sudden urge to encourage it. _Tell me to stay,_ he thinks. Beg me to stay and god help me, I’ll stay. But Chris appears to think better of whatever he was going to say. Zach isn’t about to ask him what it was; he doesn’t trust himself with the power of speech much beyond “goodbye.”

“See you around?” Chris blinks like he’s staring into a bright light. “That sounds fucking awful, Jesus.”

Zach’s eyes are wet. “Yeah, it really does.” 

He shuffles over to Chris, and it’s not so much a hug as Zach sagging against him, clutching at whatever of Chris he can reach. Again, Chris stiffens, moving subtly away and redirecting the plane at which their bodies intersect. Zach would think it was strange if every brush of their clothes, every shift of their weights against one another didn’t ache quite so much. As it is, he’s far too distracted to notice, and he’s in the car and driving away before he even considers Chris’s odd bearing. In the back seat, Skunk huffs indignantly from his carrier.

“S’okay, buddy,” Zach says. “We’re not going to the vet. We’re just going, um, home.”

_You’re such a liar,_ Chris would say if he were here.

When they find their way to the apartment, Skunk sighs at Zach in the martyred manner of the grievously betrayed and curls up next to the front door broadcasting the clear-as-glass message that this is not, and will never be, home.

Zach pours himself a drink. It’s early, but who cares.

***

Zach decides that this year’s holiday season easily goes on record as the worst ever. He spends most of his time pretending that it’s some more innocuous time of the year, April maybe, one that isn’t so aggressively associated with things like togetherness or love. He spends Thanksgiving working, going through a year’s worth of paperwork in a fugue that is mostly redundant anyway, given that they have actual employees who do these things much more intelligently and efficiently than Zach ever could. When he runs out of numbers to crunch incorrectly and his fingers are clumsy on the keys he collapses against one arm of the couch with the remote and a bottle of wine in easy reach. He was supposed to go to Joe’s. Joe, who he hasn’t told about Chris but who can probably read between the lines.

He drinks himself into a reddish-black hole instead, the TV flickering in the center. Eventually his gaze slides horizontal and he passes out without bothering to heat up the depressing turkey dinner he bought himself at the Whole Foods prepared foods counter. Which is how Zach spends Black Friday with a blinding hangover, dragging himself out of the house only because he has to take Skunk out. He’s genuinely afraid he’s going to pass out, leash in hand. He gets the feeling Skunk would just leave him for dead at this point, and Zach can hardly blame him. 

As a consequence of Thanksgiving, Joe strong arms Zach into spending the night at his place on Christmas Eve, under the guise of preventing “anything like _that_ from ever happening again. “That,” apparently, is a string of phone calls Zach has no recollection of making, most of which were to wrong numbers courtesy of a sodden lack of hand-eye coordination but several of which were to Joe in the wee hours. Zach also called Chris that night, one of the calls lasting a full ten minutes, but whether they actually spoke Zach doesn’t know. At any rate, Chris doesn’t call back, and Zach’s sure as hell not going to make a move there, especially given the high likelihood that whatever he said on the phone was intensely humiliating.

“Here you go,” Joe says, flinging open the door to the guest room after dinner. “All yours. Better get ready for a wakeup call.” 

Zach laughs it off until the next morning, when he’s assaulted by two small, very shrill children at far too early an hour. 

“Uncle Zaaaaaaaaach! Wake up, you have to wake up, it’s _Christmas._ ” Their tone of voice is identical to the one Zach would use to announce a house fire. He promises to be right there and promptly goes back to sleep. 

“So,” Joe says, as they sip coffee and survey the carnage several hours later. “You feeling like you dodged a bullet?” 

“Okay, first of all, any children of mine--” 

Joe shoots him a murderous look. 

“Any children of mine are purely hypothetical and _nonexistent_ and thus perfect,” Zach finishes hurriedly. “And no, Joe. Not really.” He takes a bitter drink of coffee. “Why do you think we broke up, anyway?” 

Joe shrugs. “I don’t know. You know I love Chris--everybody loves Chris. But everybody’s got their issues. I just figured one of yours got to be too much.” 

Zach looks out at the lit up Christmas tree, at the clumps of discarded wrapping paper that they’d tried to entreat the kids to clean up, obviously to no avail. Zach can picture Chris here so strongly that he can practically smell him. He doesn’t feel like he dodged a bullet at all. He feels more like he missed one.

***

The second week in January, Zach gets a phone call.

It’s a Sunday morning, and he’s in bed scrolling through the New York Times on his iPad, Skunk snoring at his feet. Zach’s been up once already to put the coffee on, and now he’s got an empty, brown-ringed cup perched on the night stand and a distant desire to both get up and pee and get a refill. The phone buzzes, and Skunk whines in his sleep.

“Ugh,” Zach says.

The phone keeps buzzing.

Zach reaches for it without looking, fumbling until his fingers close on the edges of the case.

“Hello?”

“Zach?”

He sits up. “Katie?” She sounds harried, upset. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m at the gate,” she says. “I need you to let me in.”

“Wait, you mean you’re at Chris’s?” 

“You’re not?” 

Zach’s not sure what she means by that. “No, I’m not. Katie, what happened? Is it your parents, are they—”

“They’re fine,” she snaps. “It’s…I need to see Chris. I need to see my brother. I need to make sure he’s okay.”

“Okay,” Zach says. “Just...hold on a sec, I just got up and I’m kind of out of it.” 

“Can you come out here and let me in, Zach?” 

“Look, I don’t know what Chris told you,” he says, running a hand back through his hair reflexively. “Or, um, didn’t tell you, I guess. I--we broke up, Katie. I haven’t seen him since before the holidays.” 

_“What?”_

“He didn’t tell you,” Zach says dully. 

She’s quiet for a second. When she speaks again, her voice is clipped. “He _told_ me that you were spending Christmas together, just the two of you,” she says. “He...he alluded to the fact that you guys had been going through some stuff, but oh my god, Zach, I never thought--” 

She loses the rest of her words to a gasp, like the full weight of Zach’s words is just hitting her. He feels strangely gratified. Zach has never quite been able to take the measure of what Chris’s family thinks of him. Maybe he was supposed to have been an exuberant phase, an accessory to their son’s early career rather than the one who stuck around. They’ve always treated him nicely enough, though, especially Katie. Her obvious shock...well, maybe it means he mattered after all. 

“I’m so sorry,” Katie continues. “But...why the hell would he lie about it? To me, of all people, to our parents?” 

Zach shakes his head. “I have no idea,” he says. “No idea at all.” He kicks the comforter off and slides out of the bed. Pinching the phone between ear and shoulder and digs through the dresser for a clean pair of pants. He’s got a feeling his morning idyll is at an end. 

“So he’s not picking up? Are you sure he’s home?” 

“I’m standing at the gate,” she says. “I can see a car out front. It’s 8:30 on a Sunday, Zach. Where else would he be?” 

Once, Zach could have agreed readily, but right now he can’t say. “Okay,” he says. “Let me call him. Maybe...maybe he’ll pick up for me. Hang out for a sec and I’ll call you right back.” 

She sighs. “Fine. I’ll be here. Bye.” 

“Bye.” 

“Dammit, Chris,” he says to the empty bedroom. “What the fuck are you doing?” He stares at Chris’s number in his phone for far too long, trying to get himself to dial. But he said he’d do it, and in his mind's eye he can see Katie now, sitting at Chris’s gate starting to panic. Hell, he’s feeling a little panicky himself. Chris has been known to hibernate, to flake out on things and go to ground, but not like this. And anyway, Zach’s always been the person who could get through, could get to Chris no matter where he was. 

The phone rings and rings, and just when Zach’s convinced that Chris is going to blow him off too, his voice comes onto the line. “Hello?” 

Zach finds himself parsing the word, straining as if to hear some clue, some nuance. 

“Dude, your sister’s over there,” Zach says. “She’s freaking.”

“What are you talking about?” 

“I’m talking about the fact that your sister’s at your house right now losing her shit because you neglected to tell her that you and I ended things. Worse, you made up some, like, Christmas getaway, which is just bizarre, Chris, and I don’t--”

“Katie’s _here?_ ”

“She’s at the gate. She just called me; she was saying all this stuff about making sure you’re okay, and I was like, why wouldn’t she think you were okay, but now that know you’ve been lying to your family about us for almost two months, I’m starting to think she might have a point.” 

“Zach, you have to call her back and talk to her,” he says. “I can’t see her right now.” 

“What is going on with you? She’s acting like she hasn’t seen you in months. I mean, she texted me that time in New York, but you got in touch with her afterwards, right?”

Chris is quiet for a second. Then, “Listen, just…you’ve got to take my word for it,” he says. “I can’t let her in now, she’ll—it’ll just be a mess. Zach, please, please just call her back and tell her I’m okay. Tell her I’ll call her. I will, I swear I will.”

Chris’s voice is high and pinched, panicked to match his sister’s, and it causes an answering stab of fear in Zach’s guts. He shakes his head slowly. 

“Fine,” he says. “But how the fuck am I supposed to know you’re okay? I’m not a liar, Chris, and I’m not going to do your dirty work for you.” 

Chris makes a frustrated noise; Zach pictures him in his room or his office, scrubbing a hand down his face.

“Come over,” Chris says finally. 

“What? Why?” Zach says the words like there’s not a thrill starting up inside him even now, like the idea of seeing Chris again isn’t the best one he’s heard in weeks. 

“Just...call Katie back,” Chris says. “And then come over here. I need to talk you.” 

Predictably, Katie picks up about five seconds into the first ring. “That took awhile. So you must’ve talked to him, right?” 

“Yeah,” Zach says. “He...he says to tell you he’s fine. And that he’s going to call you.” 

“Oh no,” she says. “No way. He’s not barricading himself in that house and making you deal with me.” 

“It’s not like that,” Zach says, even though it clearly is. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s going on, he—”

“Don’t bullshit me, Zach. What’s going on is that I haven’t seen Chris in months,” Katie says. “And look, when he said you were doing the holidays by yourselves, I was fine with it. I knew you’d been apart, and I knew—I knew you’d been going through a rough patch, okay? But I’m not going to let the two of you—“

“Whoa,” Zach says. He feels suddenly defensive, though whether it’s of himself or Chris or their erstwhile relationship, he can’t say. “Look, Katie, this is not on me. I’ve been out of the picture since the end of November. I--I moved out of his house, I’ve been staying in this awful apartment in this weird neighborhood that my dog hates, he keeps pissing on the fucking cream shag carpet and it’s gross and believe me, there is nothing I want more in the world than to be close enough to Chris right now to know what’s going on with him. But I’m not. So don’t try and--”

“Zach,” Katie cuts in. “Zach. Stop, okay? I’m sorry.” 

Zach exhales. “Thank you.” 

“I’m just worried,” she says. “I am so, so worried about him.” 

“You sent me that text in New York,” Zach says. “And I asked him about it, and he told me he’d follow up with you.”

“He called,” Katie says miserably. “He did. But the rest of it…” She shakes her head. “Something’s going on,” she says. “We had lunch plans once and he cancelled. And after that he started dodging my calls; he’d answer like every third one and be so fucking vague, just swear up and down that everything was fine, that he was just so busy…but I know him, you know? I can hear it. Couldn’t you hear it in his voice just now?”

Zach hesitates a moment. But then he nods, feeling as if the air’s been sucked out from around him with the force of Katie’s words. “Yes,” he says quietly. “I could.”

“I don’t know what it is,” says Katie. “I don’t know if he’s depressed, if it’s his writing—he can get so lost in his own head, but he always…surfaces. Especially for family; he always has time for us. And look, the only reason I’m here in place of my parents is that I swore I’d get him to talk to me, otherwise my dad wanted to come, like, break the door down.”

“And Gwynne?”

“Mom still has some sort of line she won’t cross. Something about respecting our autonomy or whatever. I say fuck autonomy, personally; Chris is being an asshole. You’ve got to help me out here. I can’t shake this feeling that if I don’t do something, if I don’t make sure he’s okay, he’s just going to disappear. Does that sound crazy?”

Zach swallows. “No,” he says. “It doesn’t. He wanted me to come over. That’s a start, right? Let me…let me try and talk to him, try and figure this out.” He feels numb even as he says the words. 

“Okay,” she says. “God, I wish...I want to make you promise me we’ll fix this.” 

“I’d promise you,” Zach says. “If I could.” 

Zach tries not to think too much on the drive to Chris’s house, but his thoughts keeps swirling back anyway, back to Italy and afterwards, to Chris’s mysterious malaise. It has to be. It has to be, right? That’s when it all started. Well, not all of it, but Zach’s not quite ready to account for the whole collection of chips and chinks, the network of stress fractures that brought the whole thing down in the end.

The route is longer from where he’s staying now--he can’t quite work up the wherewithal to call it his new place, because per Skunk’s rejection that first night it’s not Zach’s, it’s not anything.The place he’s going to isn’t his either, but Zach still finds the door key easily enough, slips it into the lock and is relieved when it turns. Then he stands back and counts the seconds, not waiting for any particular number, just maybe a time when he feels less like he’s about to walk into the house and start throwing rocks at a wasp’s nest. At last, he makes himself turn and go back inside. The house is quiet, but Zach can hear faint sounds of movement from the office in the back.

He walks in unannounced, knocks on the door frame. Chris swivels around in his desk chair. “She gone?”

“Nice to see you too, six weeks later. Yes, she’s gone. I got rid of your sister for you, and now you’re going to tell me what the fuck is going on.” 

“Zach--” 

You lied to Katie,” Zach says without preamble. “You lied to your parents. Why? What else are you lying about?” He casts around the room, which looks so very unassuming, appointed in creamy whites, warm modern woods. Zach wants there to be something here, some miasma to be cast out. It’s the only explanation he can handle. 

“What?”

“You heard me, Chris. Why wouldn’t you just tell them we broke up?” 

“Why does it matter? They’d find out soon enough, anyway. Maybe I just...didn’t feel like dealing with it with them.” 

“You know, that’s so fucking typical that I don’t even know where to start,” Zach says. “Of course, of course you just didn’t feel like it. You were always like this, everywhere this relationship threatened to intersect with your _real life_.” 

“Don’t say it like that,” Chris says, sounding stricken. “It was never like that, Zach, come on--” 

“Come on what? All this time and you don’t even have the decency to tell people we ended it, like it was nothing to you.”

Chris gets up from the desk. “It wasn’t nothing,” he says. “That’s a crock of shit and you know it.” 

“Could’ve fooled me,” Zach spits, on a roll. “You know what I did in New York? After you couldn’t pull your head out of your ass and choose me?” 

Chris’s jaw sets; he shakes his head. “You don’t have to--to confess anything to me.” 

“I fucked some guy at a party. I picked up some kid at a bar and I fucked him too. I barely even knew their names, Chris, but I knew, I _knew_ that there was like a ninety-nine percent chance they didn’t have a tenth of the issues you--” 

“Zach,” Chris says. “Stop, will you?” 

He gets out of his chair. Zach expects him to react somehow. But he leaves instead, walking past Zach into the bedroom. Zach follows, bemusedly. Chris sits down heavily on the bed and spreads his hands atop his thighs, studying them, chewing on his lower lip. Zach’s in the doorway, unsure whether or not to go further inside. The tenor of the moment isn’t what he thought it would be. His arms feel too long.

Chris makes a face like he’s having a conversation with himself. Finally, he nods as if he’s come to some decision. He turns to Zach. “I wanted to think of a better way to tell you,” he says. “I was going to figure something out, figure out a way to talk to you about it, but then you called, and hearing your voice--I don’t care what you did in New York. We weren’t nothing, Zach. You know that, right? Please tell me you know that.” 

Zach looks at the floor. He shakes his head. 

“You’re the love of my life,” Chris says. 

Zach can’t stifle a gasp. His stomach twists, but he doesn’t look up and he doesn’t stop shaking his head. This doesn’t feel real; none of this has felt real, not since the moment he walked into the house. Maybe not since the moment he picked up the phone this morning. 

“What do you have to tell me, Chris? Because the way this is going I’m starting to think you’re dying or something.” 

“Come here.”

Zach shifts from one foot to another. He thinks about the last few months, about the night he came back, when he’d been so sure things were over between them for good. He goes over and sits carefully next to Chris on the bed. He feels like he’s thirteen; Chris’s presence strange somehow, the physicality of him, like the first time Zach was alone with a guy he knew he wanted. Chris is looking at him with a vaguely terrified expression. _Whatever this is, it’s bad,_ Zach thinks. Maybe Chris really is dying. 

Chris reaches for Zach’s hand. “Okay,” he says, again as if to himself. Then he moves Zach’s hand to his abdomen, up under his sweatshirt.

“What are you—” Zach lets his words trail off. Beneath his hand, Chris’s belly is swollen, rounded and hard. His flesh feels firm and unyielding and totally foreign to Zach, nothing like the well-muscled action star six pack or the lean and spare version of Chris; not even the soft little pooch he had been working a couple months ago, back before Zach left for New York.

Chris flattens his own hand over Zach’s, like he’s afraid Zach will move away. He wants to, but he doesn’t.

“What is it?” Zach’s whispering. Why is he whispering? He should yell or something, he wants to yell, to shove Chris away. Chris’s skin feels warm even through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. “Chris, what is it?”

“Hold on a second,” Chris says, his tone sounding incongruously warm. “She’s usually kinda sleepy in the mornings.”

_“She?”_

“Oh,” Chris says, like he’s heard a sound. “Here—“ He grabs Zach’s wrist and moves his hand slightly lower. “Feel.”

Zach’s not sure what exactly he’s supposed to be feeling for. He closes his eyes because it seems appropriate, because Chris’s scared puppy look has been supplanted by something else, something more akin to wonder and Zach doesn’t know how to handle it. Zach’s dad used to take him fishing. Zach had liked the ritual of it: the dark patches of cool and fathomless water where they’d cast, the silence, the waiting. His father would raise a finger to his lips; Zach never knew if that was an entreaty to silence for the fishes’ benefit or directed at the cans of beer from which Zach stole the occasional bitter sip. When they caught one Zach would reach down and bring it up out of the lake, hands cupped beneath its long body, and it would flip against his fingers, writhing on the hook. That beached fish feeling is under his hand again now.

Chris presses his palm down over the back of Zach’s fingers and the fish arches against their joined hands, breaching and then gone. Zach yanks his hand out from under Chris’s and cradles it against his body.

“What the fuck,” Zach says, “was that.”

“Don’t freak out,” Chris says.

_“Chris.”_

“What do you think, Zachary? Use your powers of deduction.”

Zach shakes his head. Chris is clearly not taking this seriously. “Something’s wrong with you,” he says. “That doctor found something, Chris, he wanted to run more tests but you said no.”

“Zach—“

“And now it’s gotten bigger; it could be…Oh my god, is it cancer? Does it hurt? We—we have to do something, call somebody. We have to have it taken out.”

“Zach.” Chris has grabbed his wrists again. Zach flexes his fingers ineffectually, feeling like a snake gripped close behind the head. He looks up at Chris’s face. Chris is smiling, watery and tentative. “I didn’t go back to the doctor because I…I knew what they were going to find.”

Zach barks a laugh. “But that’s impossible,” he says triumphantly, as if the statement will invoke things like basic science and universal truths and the non-existence of either miracles or magic and in so doing render Chris instantly normal.

Flat.

“Yeah, well,” Chris says. He shrugs out of his sweatshirt and leans back on his elbows, and Zach can see now what Chris had tried so hard to hide. His belly rises up and rounds out like a small moon. It’s not even that big, objectively, but Zach feels dwarfed by it anyway. _It’s impossible,_ he thinks again.

He reaches out his hand again. “Can I?”

Chris nods, drawing back the hem of his t-shirt. Somehow seeing Chris’s skin helps; Zach recognizes constellations of freckles, the trail of hair running from Chris’s navel down into the elastic of his sweats. Distorted, but there.

“I don’t believe it,” Zach says. “How long?”

“Have I known? I don’t know. Maybe for awhile. When I was sick all the time I thought it was just some fluke thing, and then when it went away I was like, great, right? But then I just kept feeling off, and I was…”

“Growing?”

“Yeah. And then I started feeling her move. It’s been like…seven months? Since I felt normal, I mean.”

“You keep saying her, or she,” Zach says. “That’s the second time.”

Chris goes red. “Just a feeling,” he says.

Zach studies his face. He wonders if you can see it on their face, if someone goes crazy. He feels cold all over; his feet and hands are freezing.

“You look kinda pale,” Chris offers.

“I think I need to get under the covers.”

Chris slides over, shifts his weight so he’s not pinning the sheets down. Zach climbs in and Chris follows. He hesitates for a second before wrapping himself around Zach. Zach nearly sobs with the warmth of his body; they haven’t lain so close together in months.

“You said you didn’t know about kids,” Chris says after a minute.

Zach sighs. He could fall asleep just like this. “Is that why you didn’t tell me?”

“I just...I kept thinking about it. I _keep_ thinking about it. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. I mean, you ended it; I thought you wouldn’t want--”

“You’re an idiot,” Zach says softly. “You should’ve just fucking told me.”

“I know.”

“I mean, is it mine?” Zach elbows Chris softly in the ribs. It feels good, playful. He hasn’t felt like that in so long.

“Obviously, asshole.” There’s a smile in Chris’s voice.

Zach snorts. This isn’t really happening, but he’s happy to pretend for the moment. He rolls to face Chris and runs his thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone. Chris closes his eyes and hums at the contact.

“Of course I want this,” Zach says. “Of course I want this with you.”

“You said it would have to be with the right person.”

“Okay, now you’re just fishing, Pine,” Zach says, kissing him softly on the mouth. 

“Mmm. Can you blame me?”

“No,” Zach says. Chris looks so tired, the skin under his eyes bruised and stormy-looking against the white of the pillowcase. “You haven’t been sleeping,” Zach says. 

Chris shakes his head. “Not since you moved out. The bed’s--well.” He smiles sadly. “I’ve been sleeping on the couch.” The couch is shitty for sleeping; Zach always used to wake up from accidental naps there feeling like he’d been hit by a train.

“You should’ve just told me,” Zach says again.

“You wouldn’t have believed me. You still don’t.”

Zach swallows. He closes his eyes and kisses Chris again. “I’ve missed you,” he says. “Can you come back to me now?” He’s not completely sure what he’s asking, just that Chris feels more Chris than he has in a very long time. He takes a deep breath.

He insinuates an arm around Chris’s neck, encouraging him to scoot into the curve of Zach’s elbow so their noses are bumping, their cheeks are pressed to the same pillow. Zach can feel the fantasy welling up all around him. All the alternatives are so unattractive by comparison that he can’t help but lose himself in the way Chris looks up close, the flush of his cheeks and the white of his smile. He can’t help but picture a gangly, dandelion-haired hybrid, strong of eyebrow and out to conquer the world one five dollar word at a time.

_Other people do this,_ he thinks. _All the time._ It’s as natural as breathing. Zach doesn’t believe in miracles, but some kind of unimmaculate hiccup? He’s deluded himself about worse in forty years.

“Kiss me,” he says to Chris. Chris exhales, and cups Zach’s jaw. He tastes like coffee.

When Zach moves against Chris, he feels inadvisably loosed in a shopful of porcelain. He moves sedulously, certain he’ll put a foot wrong anyway. “Can you…do this?” he asks, sliding out of his t-shirt, plucking at Chris’s chest.

Chris is breathing hard, one hand wrapped in the hem of his own shirt like the soft nap of the cotton has momentarily stymied his nerve endings. Zach reaches for him, loosening his fingers from the fabric with fingers that only shake a little.

He casts an eye lower, to the familiar bulge in Chris’s sweatpants, the distinctly unfamiliar convexity above. “Chris,” he says.

Galvanized, Chris pushes up on his elbow and pulls his shirt off with his free hand. “Think so,” he says. He grins at Zach a little bashfully. “I haven’t exactly tried.”

Zach can feel a blush rising in his own face now. This Chris seems like a new person somehow, all strange curves and softened angles, and Zach finds he has no idea how to proceed. He takes a deep breath and runs his hand up Chris’s flank, from his ribcage to the place his hipbone would be, if it were palpable anymore. He hooks his fingertips beneath the waistband of Chris’s pants and pulls it away from his skin, feeling the reddened ruts where the fabric has bitten in tight. He sits up and kisses the marks, running his tongue over them like he can smooth them out this way.

“Take these off,” he says with a lump in his throat. _I don’t like them doing this to you,_ he thinks, as if it’s at all rational to be pissed off at a pair of sweatpants.

Chris looks down at himself, then back up at Zach. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know I must look—”

“Shh,” Zach says, determined to overcome his trepidation. He both wants and doesn’t want to look at Chris this way. “Come here,” he says, and Chris kicks his sweats off and joins Zach back down on the pillow.

Zach cards his fingers back through Chris’s hair, watches the way it falls. “You need a haircut,” he says. “I can do it for you later, if you want.”

Chris’s eyes close. “I’d like that.”

“Yeah,” Zach says, Chris leaning into his touch like a cat. They kiss languidly until they forget themselves and the air is thick with the sounds they make, wispy gasps that seem to collect around them and crowd them together despite the fact that Chris now demands higher than average levels of attention to configuration.

He lies on his side and Zach wraps around him from behind, like they’re going to sleep. Their movements feel appropriately somnolent, Zach moving a hand to Chris’s shoulder, brushing along the length of his arm as slowly as if they were underwater. Zach wants to kiss Chris’s mouth, but he contents himself with the nape of his neck and the side of his jaw, wherever he can reach.

“Tell me if I hurt you,” Zach says, when his arm is braced under Chris’s knee, the head of his dick brushing his hole. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Chris nods; Zach hears him suck in a breath. When he pushes inside the scene seems to shift. Chris cries out, clutching for Zach’s hand. “God, you’re tight,” Zach gasps. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it’s just—oh, fuck, you feel so big, I don’t know—"

Zach stills, Chris panting against his chest. “Do you want to stop?”

Chris shakes his head. “Just go slow.”

That, Zach can do. He talks to Chris while he works himself inside, tells him how beautiful he is, and how good. And he believes it, every word; he loves the way his fingers sink into the soft flesh of Chris’s hips, his ass. When he’s deep inside, he splays a hand over the curve of Chris’s belly and feels Chris sigh and shudder into the touch. For the barest moment Zach feels the iron tang of fear. But then it dissolves, so thoroughly so that from one second to the next Zach is convinced it was never there at all: that he has always held Chris this way, moved as if he’s made of glass, marveling at what they’ve made.

Afterwards, Zach clutches at Chris until the last of the aftershocks have died away. He slips out of him, kissing along his shoulder blade as he does so, like an apology for leaving. Chris sprawls on his back and Zach can’t stop looking.

“What does it feel like?” he asks in a whisper.

“I don’t know,” Chris says. “It’s hard to explain.” He frowns thoughtfully. _That_ was different, though.”

“What, sex?” Zach has considered a pretty wide range of sexual scenarios, but he can’t say this was among them. Suddenly, this feels like a glaring omission. 

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Was it--”

Chris pulls him down to kiss. “It was good,” he says. “Really good.”

Later, Zach leads Chris into the bathroom, dragging in a side chair. He folds Chris into his bathrobe and sits him down facing the mirror. “Dude, your hair really is a wreck,” he says. “Where’d you put your clippers?”

“Under the sink.”

Zach pulls the case out, the black plastic guards falling out everywhere like stiff, dead insects. “You know, there’s an order to these,” Zach says lightly. “And, like, places to put them away that don’t involve shoving them wherever they’ll fit.”

“That’s what she said?”

“You’re such a mess, Pine.” He drops a kiss to the top of Chris’s head, running his hand through the longer hair on top. Around his neck, it’s beginning to tousle and curl. If he were wearing a shirt it would make whorls around his collar. “How do you want this?”

Chris shrugs. “Like a three on the bottom? I like it longer up top.”

“Me too,” Zach says. “Okay.” He snaps the three on to the clippers, plugs them in and turns them on. His hand becomes a mass of vibration; the sensation travels down his arm and he feels like he’s wielding pure electricity, half expects Chris to jump with shock when he draws the buzzing blade across the side of his head.

“Haven’t gotten a haircut in forever,” Chris says, dropping his head forward.  
 _How long has it been since you left the house?_ Zach wants to ask. “Well, I’m not so great at the sink shampoo,” he says instead. “And I probably give a shitty scalp massage.” 

“I’ll take it.”

Zach runs the clippers around Chris’s head, the sides, the back. He takes off the guard and shaves a neat v at the nape of his neck, and maybe it’s not perfect but give it a few days’ growth and no one will be able to tell. He takes it slow around the crown of Chris’s scalp, just at the border of the shorter and longer sections, fussing over a cowlick. He frowns at his handiwork in the mirror, setting the clippers down and picking up a long, dangerous looking pair of haircutting scissors instead. They gleam silver and their heft is pleasant in his hands, satisfying.

“These are the real deal,” he says. “How long have you had them?” He presses his hand to the side of Chris’s neck, feeling the newly close-cropped hair there.

Chris cocks his head to the side, pushing into Zach’s hand. “You’re warm,” he says. “Feels nice. I, uh, I had a girlfriend a long time ago who cut hair. I ended up just hanging onto them. He squints up at Zach. “You know how to do this?”

“I’m just going to trim it up a little, right?”

“Okay.” Chris sighs. “I trust you.”

Zach moves slowly, running locks of hair through his fingers out to the end to snip. Chris’s hair is soft and smooth, light browns and golds with the occasional strand of silver to match whatever’s in his beard. Zach has been skeptical about Chris’s fascination with his grey, but he has to admit it’s a good look, incongruous on a face that can skew boyish so easily. The hair feels cool against his fingertips; he wants to keep touching it forever, something deep in him thrilling at the rightness he feels in this moment, attending Chris like this. Chris looks down at his hands, head heavy, letting Zach move him into position as needed, forward and back and side to side.

At last, Zach steps back and surveys his work. “Not half bad,” he says, and Chris looks up. Their eyes meet in the mirror and Zach drops his hand, feels the scissors slide down to catch at the last joints of his middle and index fingers. Chris smiles at him, almost shyly, and Zach beams back, ducking down and turning Chris’s face towards him like he’s missed a spot, like he’s going to make another cut. He kisses him messily instead, keeps doing it until he loses his balance and stumbles against the bathroom counter.

They take a bath afterwards to get the sticky, stinging pieces of hair off, Zach swimming to one side of Chris’s cavernous bathtub and pulling Chris against him. He wets Chris’s hair and lathers it with a handful of shampoo, careful not to let the creamy suds near Chris’s eyes.

“I could get used to this,” Chris says, limp against Zach’s chest. He’s caught Zach’s hand under the water and brought it to rest against the apogee of his belly again. Zach breathes against the impulse to wrest free.

“I mean, you get it now, right?” Chris continues quietly. “Why I couldn’t see people. Katie—she’s like a fucking bloodhound or something. She’d _know._ And she’d drag me into some specialist and then everyone would know, and I—”

“Shh,” Zach says. “I get it.”

“And I had to have time to _think._ And to tell you, Zach, I feel so bad for not telling you; I didn’t know how, and I thought you’d freak—”

“Hey,” Zach says, swallowing a glut of hurt. “It’s fine. Remember what I said when you told me you wanted to take the break?”

Chris makes a strange noise, somewhere between a harsh laugh and a sob. “We still on for the cabin upstate?”

“You can have, um, a whole passel of little farmhands. You’re already on your way.”

“God,” Chris says. “I feel like I’m in a dream.”

“You? A couple hours ago, I thought—well, I’m not sure what I thought. But it wasn’t this.”

Chris snorts. “I mean, how could it be this,” he asks. “Not in a million fucking years.”

Zach is standing in the office, staring at Chris’s laptop.

He can hear Chris through the wall; he’s on the phone with someone. His agent, maybe. Zach frowns. He can’t remember the last time he heard Chris on the phone. Most of his calls seem to go to voicemail lately, the phone kept on silent, buzzing here and there around the house like an insistent insect. At first Zach seeks it out, on an out-of-the-way end table or secreted behind the couch cushions, but then he begins to suspect that Chris is losing track of it on purpose. He understands about Katie, about Chris’s parents, but he’s not sure how to feel when the lack of communication extends to him. 

One afternoon he’s running late, stuck behind a horrible wreck on the freeway, and Chris will not pick up his goddamn phone. All Zach can imagine is himself as the one at home in this scenario, the insistent military chug of traffic helicopters over the house, his mind wandering to dark places.

“Oh my god,” he says when he walks in the door a full hour and twenty minutes later than expected. “I’m not dead, I promise. Traffic was completely insane.” He imagines Chris waiting, pretending not to be relieved. But the house is quiet, Chris nowhere to be seen. He comes out of the office a few minutes later to find Zach sorting mail in the kitchen.

“Oh,” he says. “You’re back.” He looks at the oven clock. “Is it late?” 

Now, Chris has opted to pick up the phone for a change. Zach shouldn’t take it personally; after all, this is Chris’s meal ticket, though the idea of Chris working seems distant to Zach now, as if all those things Chris did—the way they met— happened to a different person, someone Zach no longer knows. 

Zach crosses the room to the laptop and taps a key. It’s a terrible idea; he’s always been of the mind that any shit you dredge up this way is your own to deal with. But he can’t stop himself, even as the screen lights up and the document Chris was working on last pops up on the screen, and Zach does the dance of the guilty, shifting from foot to foot, glancing back over his shoulder. The office door is closed, and he can still hear Chris talking outside.

The document is cryptically titled, a string of letters Zach supposes means something to Chris. It’s also blank. Zach’s fingers skitter across to the menu bar, opening up Chris’s word processor. There’s a folder titled californiastory, all mashed together and lowercase and _Chris_ , and Zach clicks on it with an illicit thrill, certain that he’s about to be met with the fruits of Chris’s labors. When it opens, though, it’s suspiciously empty save a single document containing a long column of dates and a subfolder full of images. 

Zach opens it and takes a long breath. It’s the photographs Chris shot in San Francisco all those months ago, long waves of amber grass stretching out to the distant ocean. Some are grayscale, and Zach stares at them for a long time before he can bring himself to open the last two images. They’re of Zach. In the first, he’s staring down at his phone, and he knows with certainty that he’s inspecting the picture he took of Chris absorbed in his camera. He remembers what happened after that—Chris made a sound, unconsciously or on purpose, Zach doesn’t know, and Zach looked up, straight into the camera lens. 

The man looking back at Zach now looks gaunt and strange, and the way he regards the camera speaks to a gnawing sort of hunger. He disturbs Zach, that man, and when he hears the sound of footsteps outside the office door he’s only too happy to click the top of the laptop shut and busy himself in a file cabinet.

***

“I want tacos,” Zach says. “Or, hey, let’s go back to La Traviata. We haven’t been since your birthday.” It’s a grey day, chilly. Zach plants a fat thumbprint on the kitchen window and watches the fog around it. He feels like a little kid with his nose pressed up to toy shop glass.

Chris comes into the kitchen, clasping a mug of tea. “You wanna go out?”

“It’s been awhile, yeah. Come on, aren’t you sick of cooking?”

“Not really.”

Zach makes a frustrated noise and spins around to face Chris. “I’m going stir crazy,” he says.

“You go out all the time,” Chris says. And it’s true, Zach does. To the grocery store, to meetings, where he’s excellent at moving forward on projects that don’t have much to do with him. The rest of them…he’s not thrilled to be reminded of that now. He’s dragging his feet about backing out of several out of town commitments, and his phone has been ringing far too often and too insistently lately. Zach, who has prided himself on his professionalism from his very first audition, feels sick at the number of calls he’s screened. He’ll get to them, he reasons. It’s just that he has no idea what to say.

So, there’s been that. And there’s the fact that he had coffee with Katie a few weeks back, which is another thing he’d prefer to forget.

She’d walked into the joint with a jaundiced eye and left, Zach thought, this close to calling the cops on both of them to arrange a welfare check. He’d gotten the impression that it was some sense of clinical pride that left her refusing to literally break and enter in search of Chris, that and the fact that Zach seemed to have successfully convinced her of his own sanity.

“So you’re back together,” she says. 

“The day you called--I don’t know, I went over there and we...we talked about things. And we decided we thought we could make it work.” He smiles, and that at least is genuine.

“And you’re here without him why exactly?”

“He’s going through a lot right now.”

“I’m his sister, Zach.”

“And I’m his…his partner,” Zach says. “Look, I know it’s a dick move to pull rank, and I’m not trying to do it, but I just think he needs a little more space to…process some things.”

She glares at him. “And this is all coming from him?”

Zach holds up his hands. “I swear,” he says. “I’m just the messenger.”

The strange thing about it is that in this moment, while he’s sitting here, he finds it simpler to believe this explanation. The omissions spill from his lips with disturbing ease. _He’s going through a tough time. He doesn’t know what to do about work. He hasn’t written in weeks._ These are neat and normal problems, and here in front of Katie Zach feels at home among them, as if Chris’s house exists on another plane entirely, growing more distant and unreachable with every moment Zach spends outside.

But step back through that door and it’s the converse, messy and wondrous and a little gross and all the richer for it. The way they were back at the beginning, but heightened now, the secret seeping into the nooks and crannies of their life together like a vein of precious metal, all the lovelier for being unmined.

“I want to go out with you,” Zach says, back in the kitchen.

Chris bites at the inside of his cheek. “To tacos?”

“Or wherever you want. We can just go drive around, I don’t even care.”

“Hmm,” Chris says. Then, “Let me go change.”

Zach looks him up and down; he’s wearing a pair of jeans he’s been forced to leave mostly unbuttoned at the waist and one of his old henleys. It had been oversized to begin with, but the way it drapes now makes Zach feel extremely uncomfortable in that he wants to slam Chris up against a wall and also snarl at anything that looks at him crosswise, while simultaneously being discomfited by the clearly gendered implications of this reaction. Now, he’s buoyed by the thought of going out together, so much so that he walks over to Chris and indulges the impulse provoked by his shirt.

“I want you to go out like this,” he says, twisting a handful of creamy cotton in his fist. “Want everyone to see, to know I did it, I fucked you.” _To know I loved you so much this happened._

Chris turns red and squirms against him. “Jesus, Zach,” he says. But he lets Zach hold him there long enough to suck a welt onto his throat, and when he breaks away to go into the bedroom he’s hard.

He emerges a few minutes later in the same jeans, overlain with a much larger long sleeve and flannel, topped with a coat. Maybe overkill, but as far as Zach’s concerned Chris can dress up like the Michelin Man if it means he’ll deign to escape the confines of the house.

Zach feels almost giddy in the car; he’s driving, and he keeps reaching over to squeeze Chris’s thigh. Chris is quiet; he keeps glancing out the windows and in the rear view mirror.

“Nobody’s following us,” Zach says.

Chris doesn’t reply.

They go to the taco place, because Chris likes it and because Zach wants to be able to sit one of the flimsy, waxcloth-topped tables and reflect on how much better things are than they were the last time he and Chris ate here.

“I can’t eat spicy shit anymore,” Chris says, scanning the menu. “I get heartburn.”

“So get the grilled chicken,” Zach says.

“The grilled chicken is _boring._ And I’ve been thinking about that super hot one with the carnitas for like the last two weeks.”

“Poor baby,” Zach says, smiling. It’s after two, the lunch crowd thinning. No one seems to look twice at them, and Chris is finally starting to relax. He orders three of the spicy tacos and Zach promises to feed him antacids later. 

“Oh god,” Chris moans, biting into his first taco when their food arrives. “I’m in heaven. This is heaven, Zach.”

“Yeah,” Zach says. “It is.”

Chris looks up at him across the table. There’s a fleck of red sauce at the corner of his mouth and his eyes are clear and warm and so blue, and Zach pleads with whatever higher power might be listening to let him remember this moment, just like this, until cognition itself fails him.

Obviously, things go to hell in short order soon thereafter, and later Zach will think, as he searches for cold comfort, that at least Chris got to eat his tacos.

“Fuck,” Zach says after the server has cleared their plates.

“What?” Chris is facing away from the windows, and he spins around to look as best he can. His face blanches as he sees what Zach sees—a not insubstantial herd of photographers milling around out front.

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” Zach says.

“Fuck!” Chris says, turning back to face Zach. “Fuck this goddamn place; we’re never coming here again.”

“What, you think someone here tipped them off?”

“Had to be. This place is a shithole, it’s not like it’s getting a whole lot of fucking buzz on its own.”

“Keep your voice down,” Zach hisses. “Christ.”

Chris buries his head in his hands. “What am I going to do?”

“We’re going to be fine,” Zach says, trying to keep his voice even. “We’re going to pay our bill and walk out of here and get in the car. Chris, it’s the paps, it’s not a firing squad.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re not the one who—“ He gestures at himself.

“You look fine,” Zach says. “You look like you’ve put on some weight, is all.”

“And you don’t think they eat that up? Please, I haven’t worked in months and I haven’t been around and then I show up all fucking fat stuffing my face with tacos? They probably got a bunch of creeper shots of me jamming food in my mouth already. And of course you’re here, they’ll love that, won’t they?”

Zach forces himself to take a measured sip of his water. He hopes the numbing slide of the icy liquid down his throat works as well on the rest of him. “I thought you were over this,” he says. “I thought the whole fucking point was that you were over this now.”

“The point? The point of what?”

“Never mind,” Zach says. He looks out the window like he’s checking the weather, like they’ve been waylaid waiting for a storm to pass. Then he opens his wallet, counting out cash. “Get up,” he says when he’s done. He stands himself, offering Chris a hand. Chris looks at it like it like he doesn’t know what hands are for. Zach sighs angrily, reaching for Chris’s wrist and pulling. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get this over with.”

The circus starts as they get outside; predictably, Chris seems to be the target, his absence on the scene a source of rampant curiosity and probing questions. Zach’s earlier chill has morphed and hardened into a cold sort of rage, and the only thing that saves him from decking several people inside thirty seconds is the fact that he’s let himself slip into a sort of dissociated state. All he can see is the parking lot; all he can feel is his fingernails balled up and cutting at the centers of his fists. The rest of the world is greyed out somehow. He’s dimly aware of Chris beside him; he thinks as if through a veil that he hopes Chris doesn’t do anything stupid.

There’s a blur of movement and a shout. No, Zach thinks. His arm shoots out automatically and wins a handful of Chris’s flannel. He pulls with everything in him, half expecting the fabric to come away in his hand entirely.

“Get in the fucking car,” he says under his breath. Chris just stares, eyes huge like an animal caught out at night, so Zach jams the button on his key fob and wrenches the passenger door open, shoving Chris inside more roughly than he means to. He still feels numb, a faint tingle in his extremities the only thing allowing him to keep his feet. He’s in the driver’s seat before he knows it, backing out and turning onto the road in a screech of brakes, barely looking because fuck ‘em if they can’t get out of the way.

“Are you okay?” he asks after a mile or so, eyes still on the street. “Chris?”

Chris doesn’t reply. Zach spares a glance over to find him ashen, breath coming in a wheeze. “Jesus fucking Christ," Zach says, swerving onto a side street and jamming the car into park. He leans over against the strain of his seat belt, gets his fingers around Chris’s jaw. He makes a choking sound, a horrible wet rasp; Zach will pry his mouth open, reach down and sweep the culprit free like he once did for Noah with a chicken bone, he swears—

Chris jerks against Zach’s hand and he seems to pink up again, clapping a hand against his chest in a motion that is mercifully violent and alive. “I can’t,” he says, fingers scrabbling against his sternum. “I can’t breathe.”

_If you can say you’re choking you’re not choking._

“You’re having a panic attack,” Zach says, slumping back against the seat. He lets his hand fall to Chris’s shoulder, squeezes it. He wants Chris to talk again. Zach is coming out of his haze now, hands and feet pin-and-needling.

Chris sucks in a deep, sobbing breath, pitches forward to rest his head in his hands. His shoulders begin to shake. There’s no sound in the car but their breathing and the rhythmic swish of Chris’s body wracking against the leather upholstery.

Zach undoes his seatbelt and crawls across the divider between their seats, knees around his ears. He slips into Chris’s lap, rests his head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Oh, my baby. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

***

Zach dreams he’s walking in a house at night. He knows it with the lights off; it’s black as pitch and he has his arms out ahead of him to brush against the walls, but he knows where he’s going. The worst that can happen is a stubbed toe, an incriminating thunk to wake Mom and Dad. Somewhere through the walls a TV’s on.

There’s a kid here too, walking just ahead of Zach. He’s wearing pajamas, stripes on a light background. Zach can see the kid’s legs moving as his vision adjusts to the low light. His legs look blue and fuzzy like all pale things do in the dark. His feet slap lightly on the hardwoods.

“Where’s the baby?” Zach says to the kid.

“Shh,” he says back over his shoulder, the barest breath of a whisper. “Down the hall.”

They walk for a long time, until Zach’s sure it must be morning. But the dark doesn’t get any less dark, and the kid doesn’t stop walking, and he won’t answer any of Zach’s questions. The TV in the background sounds like it’s submerged, but it wells up louder and clearer the longer they walk until they come out into the living room. They’ve emerged behind the couch, the backs of two grownup heads protruding above it. The TV is flickering. The kid raises a finger to his lips.

Zach comes awake. Chris’s side of the bed is empty and the bathroom light is on. He gets up to pee in the night what seems like every hour, or at least he complains about doing so every morning. Zach wouldn’t know; he’s slept like the dead ever since he got back to California. He’s not sure why he’s awake now. He slips out of bed and pushes open the door to the bathroom, yellow light arcing out to meet him. Chris is sitting hunched over the toilet.

“You good?” Zach asks, rubbing at his eyes.

“Fucking—no,” Chris says. “It’s weird. I’ve been trying to take a piss off and on for like the last hour. I can’t get it all out.” He looks up at Zach, lower lip fat and trembly. Zach snorts.

“Shut _up_ ,” Chris whines, smiling in spite of himself. “I’m a fucking disaster. And I can’t _sleep._ ”

Zach pads up to him carefully. Chris is naked, his boxers down around one ankle.

“What’s wrong, exactly?” Zach asks. He lets his gaze dart once over Chris’s torso, his belly and the way his thighs spread on the seat. His dick is hanging limply into the bowl, and the sight of him—all of him—makes Zach’s mouth go dry. His face heats up and he drags his eyes back to Chris’s face. 

“It won’t come out,” Chris says again. “It’s better if I lean forward, but—“ He demonstrates, angling his body toward the floor, but it looks unwieldy and dangerous, like he’s going to fall on his face. He spreads his legs wider to accommodate his abdomen; his heels coming off the floor.

“Hold on,” Zach says, an image of Chris splayed on the tile with a busted face floating in his mind’s eye. “Let me…let me help you.”

“Huh? What are you—oh,” Chris says, when Zach gets on his knees in front of him. “Zach, I don’t think—“

“Just relax,” Zach says. “You need to go, right?”

Chris winces. “Yeah,” he says. “Fuck, all the time now, it’s like she’s pressing on me all the time—“

A muscle in Zach’s jaw twitches spasmodically. “Here, brace on my shoulder,” he says, fixing his hand on the nearer of Chris’s knees. “There.”

Chris can get a little more leverage that way, leaning a little deeper into it, hips opening. He shifts his weight again. Zach looks at his face; his mouth has fallen open. An ineffectual drop or two hits the water and he groans, shaking his head. “Not working,” he says.

Zach frowns. He runs his hand soothingly along Chris’s thigh, then into the dark v of space between his legs. “Whoa, whoa,” Chris says. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Just—“

Zach is panting; he feels hot all over, and sweat is beginning to bead up on his brow. He takes Chris carefully in hand; he’s so soft here, so soft. “God, come on,” he says. “Just—“

Chris leans back a little like he’s trying to improve the view, and Zach moves in front of him, moves his free hand and presses it to Chris, just above his dick. Chris moans, pushing forward against Zach’s hand. “Oh,” he says. “What are you—what are you doing, don’t—” But it’s working, Zach knows it is, and a second later hot liquid spurts over his hand. He looks up at Chris, whose expression is beatific, his mouth a lax, red oval. Zach rests his head against Chris and lets himself shudder, Chris’s face and the low sounds of pleasure he makes tripping something deep in Zach’s brain and making his dick fill. Crossed wires, that’s all.

The stream slows and Zach shakes Chris off, bringing his own wet hand up and holding it away from his body. It’s cooling already in the air of the room; he gets to his feet and yanks the tap on with his dry hand, shoves the other one under the running water. He can feel Chris watching him, he can feel his heart thudding behind his ribs.

Chris gets up clumsily, leaning on the counter for balance. He runs a hand back through his hair—it’s getting long again, Zach wants to sit Chris in front of him one more time and prune it—and ducks his head, looking up at Zach through his eyelashes.

“That was weird,” he says.

“I, um,” says Zach.

Chris looks pointedly at Zach’s crotch. “It got you hard.”

Zach moves a hand over himself reflexively; he’s wearing pajama pants and a shirt but it all feels far too flimsy. “I’m sorry.”

Chris moves alongside him—they don’t work so well face to face these days. He takes hold of the back of Zach’s neck like he’s cuffing a kitten and kisses him, open-mouthed and toothy. 

He’s hard for Chris more often than not lately, though maybe that’s just the particulars of their situation, bored and in too-close quarters. They haven’t been out together in weeks, and everything feels heavier, the air in the house dragging over Zach’s skin in a new way.

“Not worth it,” Zach says to Chris’s apologies. “If anything like that day happened again—”

And then he shakes his head and won’t hear any more about it. Chris opens his mouth sometimes like he wants to mount some kind of counter argument, but the thing is, there’s not one.

So they cook and eat and sleep and watch movies, and they fuck.

Zach loves Chris like this, in ways that make him blush and hide his face like a child who’s had an accident. He’s always been confident about sex. As soon as he could, he made it his business to be so. He can make light of it all he wants, but his looks and his bearing call up a specific kind of murderous swagger, and damn if Zach hasn’t been able to make that pay dividends over the years, in so many more ways than one—once he got the hang of it, anyway.

Chris had always been his biggest win, and every time Zach caught himself waiting for the other shoe to drop over the years he’d think back to the beginning, to the way Chris took what seemed like one look at Zach and let himself be unmade, spread wide and taken apart.

Now it’s Zach who feels pried open and scattered, his forehead pressed to Chris’s shoulder, his stomach flush with Chris’s back, both planes of flesh slick with perspiration. Chris is so tight, everything inside him jumbled up, a mass of guts and vessels and nerve endings and…whatever else, and it makes Zach’s dick feel bigger. He bottoms out and Chris loses it, whining, tossing his head on the pillow.

“Gonna keep you like this,” he says, unsure if Chris is even listening. “Plug you up with come so you can’t help it, can’t stop it.”

He can’t see Chris’s face; he wants to wrench his neck around and watch his eyes as he says the words. He could move them, fuck Chris on his back with the mound of his belly between them, but sometimes when Chris lies on his back too long he can’t breathe. Zach imagines the sounds he makes going high and shallow, and it makes him flex his fingers over Chris’s hip and drive in deeper. They’ve tried it on hands and knees, too, but it’s better this way, better to hold fast to Chris in the bed like this. Zach can’t get purchase to thrust, and as the heat builds between them he catches Chris’s hands and holds them at his chest, his own hand strained with the effort, webbing gone white with tension between his thumb and forefinger.

“Zach,” Chris moans, trying jerk his hips into the folds of blanket.

“No, baby,” Zach says. “No.” He wants to stay here just like this, let Chris squeeze around him, feel every shift and swallow on his dick until he thinks he’ll go mad with it. He drifts on waves of pleasure and frustration. He can’t see, but he knows Chris is red-faced, dick flushed to match.

Sometimes Zach catches himself pretending.

_It’s a long time ago, a Friday in the spring; they both have the day off. Zach wakes Chris up at noon with a hand on his dick, has him moaning into the pillows by twelve-fifteen. Afterwards he sprawls back, pulls Chris against him, their sweat cooling under the ceiling fan._

“You’re so full,” he mutters in Chris’s ear, his breath making Chris convulse. “Can’t take any more, can you?”

Chris shakes his head wildly. “Touch me,” he says. “Please.”

Zach shakes his head, laughing a little meanly, and sinks his teeth into Chris’s shoulder.

_Chris’s presence makes him feel decadent. His beautiful friend, who matches him round for round, reads thick books and laughs at Zach’s jokes and loves him back. These moments still feel stolen and secret. He breaks his own rules and lights a cigarette in bed; he’s trying to quit but it won’t take for a year or so._

They rock together on the bed for a long time, until Zach forgets where they come apart, if they even do. Chris breaks first, always, in a stream of pleas and platitudes, and it’s only then that Zach touches him—not his dick, but the swell of him, and when he does he feels the same wrong-footed zing along his synapses as he did earlier in the bathroom, his hand soaked between Chris’s legs. He forgets Chris’s restraints then, too, and Chris drops his hand to his dick greedily, their hands colliding softly on Chris’s upstroke, twice or three times before Chris shoots, clenching around Zach and pulling him inexorably along.

They come back to themselves and roll apart, Zach an easy flop over, Chris more of a four point turn. Zach watches Chris’s profile, his wet mouth. He reaches over and combs a mat of sweaty hair back from his forehead.

_“That’s so fucking gross,” Chris says, and steals a drag. Their fingers tangle. Later, Chris drops his hand as the limo doors open and it doesn’t bother Zach. Private lives are private, and anyway, they have forever._

Sometimes they talk after, conspiratorial whispers about things like names and tiny furniture. But it’s late now, and Zach’s bone tired again. He never remembers those conversations in the morning.

***

One Saturday, Zach pulls up the drive to find Katie sitting in the middle of the gravel, leaning back on the gate.

He chews on his lip as he puts the car in park, pulling up behind hers. Why she’s not in it, he doesn’t know. Today’s a shitty day. Clammy, can’t decide whether or not it’s going to rain. He opens his door and gets out, and as he does he realizes that he’s afraid.

“Hi,” he says cautiously.

“Take me in there with you,” she says. “Or I’m calling the cops.”

Zach laughs, because he’s not sure what else to do. The sound hangs in the air between them. “Oh my god, come _here_ ,” he says, holding a hand out. He pulls her into a hug. Their bodies are stiff; they clap together like wood. “It’s been forever,” he says.

“Zach,” she says. “I’m not kidding. I’ve been out here buzzing Chris for half an hour, and I swear to god—” 

“No, I totally get it,” he says. “Totally get it, we’ve been—um. Here, get back in your car, okay? I’ll follow you in.”

He thinks about texting Chris on the short drive up to the house, but he decides if Katie really has been out front for a half hour she’s probably been calling too. Knowing Chris, he’s destroyed his phone in a blind panic. He swings his car into the space in front of the garage and gets out as fast as he can. He wants to run into the house, but he stands and forces himself to smile at her. She doesn’t smile back. When she comes past him he starts to walk too, easing into it and letting his longer legs carry him ahead, stepping neatly in front of her to unlock the door.

“Chris?” he calls as he steps into the front room. “Hey, guess what? Katie’s here. She…she said she was calling. You turn your phone off again?”

In the answering silence, Zach and Katie shift from foot to foot. They’re both at a loss, Zach thinks, and no matter what there’s some small comfort in that. He remembers the day they had coffee, tries on more answers. We’ve been going through a tough time. A bad fit, even if Zach is good at lying.

“Can I get you a drink?”

She doesn’t answer, just walks out of the room. Zach doesn’t follow; he can hear her a second later pounding on the bedroom door, hear her muffled admonishments. Abruptly, they stop, and the door slams.

There’s another silence, but on its heels comes the thunderclap reverberation of a loud argument, the kind a child might stow away to hear between parents and come away regretting, having understood perhaps every fifth word but certain nonetheless that he alone is the cause.

Zach crosses his arms over his chest and walks toward the door.

“—don’t care what’s happening, you can’t just—”

“Zach’s not—”

“Last—this happened—”

“Not a fucking kid anymore, Katie—”

He can’t hear enough, and it’s stressing him out to stand here straining to do it, when he’s certain they know he’s there, performing for him like an audience. He’s not in the mood today.

He goes in the kitchen and yanks the cork out of a bottle of wine, pours himself half a glass. When Katie comes back out it’ll be all over his mouth but he doesn’t care. He’ll kiss Chris with that mouth later and they’ll laugh about it. Zach drinking in the afternoon like they used to do.

He’s finished the glass by the time Katie comes tearing back into the living room, face splotchy. She stops and stares at Zach in the kitchen, and for a moment he curses Chris’s open floor plan for making this feel even more like a stage. She comes closer, looking like violence, and for a moment he fully expects her to hit him. She doesn’t, just stands there an arm’s length away and yanks her ponytail out, scrapes her hair back up and redoes it.

“Are you going to do anything about this?” she says.

He sets the empty wine glass down on the counter and prods the base with his forefinger. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She sniffs, makes a high thin sound that seems to snake inside him, cutting through the warm haze of the wine and coiling up in his gut right where he doesn’t want it. It sounds a lot like loss.

“I can’t do it anymore,” Katie says. “Keep calling. It...it hurts too much. You understand that, don’t you?”

Zach blinks at her.

“I came to see if he was safe--”

“Of course he’s safe,” Zach snaps. “What the fuck do you think I am?”

She shakes her head, holds a hand up. “I came to see if he was safe, and--and he is, I guess. But you need to think, Zach. You need to think hard, because--”

“What do I need to think about, Katie? What are you going to tell me about Christopher that I have not already spent years of my life thinking about? Because if you think I would let anything-- _anything_ \--happen to him, then you don’t know me at all.”

She shakes her head, looks at the wine glass, the counter, anywhere but Zach’s face. “At least make sure he’s eating,” she says finally. “He looks like shit.”

Zach turns back to the counter. He takes up the wine bottle again, but her eyes are on him and he feels caught out, seized by a clutch of embarrassment. He sets the bottle down, but he doesn’t turn around. He stands there a long time, until he hears the small sounds of her retreating from the room. He counts backwards from ten for good measure and when he turns he’s alone again.

She’s left the door standing wide open. Zach goes over and stands at the threshold. He looks out after her, but she’s gone. The sky has given up on precipitation and a few anemic rays of sun have cut through the clouds to the west. The air still smells like rain, though, loamy and thick. Zach folds himself onto the front step, wraps his arms over his knees and sits.

He remembers when Chris bought this place; Zach came to a party here and got too drunk to drive home. When everyone left he passed out on Chris’s couch while Chris fucked some girl back in the bedroom. She was pretty, whipsmart; he remembers thinking that Chris could do much worse, but that was earlier in the evening when he was a little less shitfaced and a little more benign. Sometime in the night Zach woke up, head throbbing. He lay there in the dark listening to them, and when the girl got up to leave Chris went with her to the door. Zach heard him kiss her goodbye, wet smack of lips, a soft laugh. When she was gone Chris came in and sat at Zach’s feet on the couch, lifted up his legs and draped them back over his lap like a blanket.

_“I know you’re awake,” Chris says._

_“No way,” Zach says. “I’m sleeping like a baby.”_

_“Whatever.” Then, quieter, “I know your breathing, what it’s like when you sleep.”_

_Zach leaves it a beat, long enough for the tension to rise. Because it will rise, it always does between them and Zach loves it, he loves it. “Wow, Pine, that is super gay.”_

_“You’re super gay,” Chris says. He curls a warm hand around the arch of Zach’s bare foot and works his thumb along the cord of muscle there. Zach sighs._

_“Here,” Chris says. “Come sleep in the guest room.”_

_Zach kicks at him softly. “Aw, you mean you don’t wanna snuggle in your filthy sheets? I’m disappointed.”_

_Another beat, and Zach breathes in deep._

_“I mean. We could if you wanted to.”_

_Zach smiles up at the ceiling. “Not tonight,” he says. “I’m definitely not drunk enough tonight.”_

_Chris starts up with the thumb again. “Should’ve gotten ahold of you earlier,” he says. “Before you started puking up Cheetos next to the pool. Thanks for that, by the way.”_

_“Not one of my finer moments,” Zach says. “At least I got out of the pool first.”_

_Chris laughs. “Small favors, dude. Now, c’mon, get up. It’s for your own good; if you sleep on this couch you’re going to regret it in the morning. Trust me.” He slides out from under Zach’s legs and stands up. He’s wearing boxers and a t-shirt and if he were at the right angle and it wasn’t dark Zach could totally see his junk through his fly._

_Zach groans, but he takes Chris’s extended hand anyway, hauling himself up off of the couch._

_“You and your rustic modern bullshit,” he says. “This thing might as well just be on the floor.”_

_There’s a moment then in which, in retrospect, it could have happened. Zach gets to his feet, swaying slightly. Chris doesn’t let go of his hand. Again Zach waits, and again their leitmotif surges, the air thrumming with it. Tonight, in this moment, it sounds too good to stop just yet. Better to stay here on the edge a little longer, Zach thinks. The vertigo is addictive.  
_

There’s a noise behind him, and Zach half turns to see Chris there, leaning against the door. He looks tired, Zach thinks, drained. Zach feels drained himself, a little sick. The wine has made his teeth feel woolly and he feels a lump rise in his throat as he runs his tongue over them.

“Hi,” Chris says.

Zach smiles at him. Chris frowns back.

“What’ve you been doing out here?” Chris says.

“Sitting,” Zach says. “Hey, you want to go for a walk or something? Just up the road.”

“Maybe,” Chris says, biting his lip. “Hey listen, was...was Katie here earlier?”

Zach freezes, gaze trained on the ground at his feet. He looks back up at Chris again. He’s wearing a grey shirt the color of the scraps of cloud Zach’s been contemplating. He frowns at the sky. How long has he been outside? If Katie was here, it might have been days ago. He rubs his eye with the heel of his hand.

“No,” he says. “Just us.”

***

“I saw a coyote out here the other day. Like, for real. And I think...I think it killed something, a rabbit maybe. I found a carcass out on the edge of the yard.”

Zach brushes his hair back out of his eyes. They’re out in the back on a blanket, way out close to the fenceline. The wind is kicking up and Zach’s getting cold. “A rabbit?” he says.

“I don’t know. It was all torn up,” Chris says. “Just looked like meat. There were, like, organs and stuff.”

“Offal,” Zach says. He means to make a bad joke, but Chris isn’t paying attention. Zach lies back and crosses his arms behind his head. There’s a hawk way up there; Zach can see the buff of its belly against the blue. He’s always liked hawks, the way they seem to set up shop even here in the city, neatly dispatching rats and songbirds in lieu of wilder things. He wonders if this one is big enough to take a rabbit, but his sense of scale is all off from down here on the ground. The bird drifts north, out of Zach’s field of vision, and he’s too lazy to follow it. He closes his eyes and lets the bright light play red through his lids.

“Remember when we were in Amsterdam, when I asked you about miracles?”

Zach nods. “Kind of.” He goes back and forth. There are times when those days, the end of the tour and what followed and everything else before that, are only accessible in the haziest way. Trying to remember feels like prying apart the contents of a sodden archive, fallen victim to a leak or a flood.

“Are you going to ask if I believe in them now?” Zach says.

“No,” Chris says. “I just like the irony.”

“Do you think it’s a miracle?”

Chris is quiet for a minute. Zach looks over at him. He’s smiling, eyes downcast.

“Sometimes,” Chris says. “Sometimes I think it’s somebody’s idea of a joke. And it’s got nothing to do with me, not really. I just happen to be laughing.”

***

Chris kicks his way out of bed before dawn, watery light just starting to filter in through the curtains. At first, Zach doesn’t think anything of it; Chris has slept restlessly for weeks now, tossing and turning, getting up to use the bathroom what feels like every hour or so. Chris’s body frightens Zach now, not just in terms of dimensions but in the way it seems to have truly taken on a life of its own, the parts of Chris that make him _him_ subsumed to the whims of some unknowable and inconsiderate lodger. He thinks Chris is similarly daunted.

“My back hurts,” Chris says when he returns.

“Mmm,” Zach hums into the pillow, hoping he sounds unconscious enough that Chris will let him alone. He drifts back into a half-sleep, brain tripping along the edge of a dream. Lungs. He’s thinking of a great set of lungs; purplish and slick. They inflate like a bellows, deflate with a gust of hot air. They’re all he can see behind his eyes.

Chris jostles his shoulder. The light looks a little stronger. Zach wonders what time it is.

“What?” Zach says, voice thick. His eyelashes feel sticky and he rubs a fleck of gritty sleep off onto his cheek.

“I feel weird,” Chris says.

Zach sits up. “Like weird how?”

“I don’t know,” Chris says. “Off.”

“Off _how?_ ” Zach asks.

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Chris says. “Just off.”

The thing about the end, Zach realizes, is that he never actually expected it to arrive.

“Come here,” Zach says. “Let’s just…you want to go back to sleep? Maybe you’ll feel better if you go back to sleep.”

Chris nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

Zach holds the covers up and Chris slides back underneath, Zach drawing them back down against the pillows, resting his head on Chris’s shoulder. “It’s going to be fine,” Zach mutters, his lips against Chris’s skin.

He feels Chris tense beside him, sucking in a breath. “Zach, what if—“

“It’s going to be fine,” Zach says again.

Chris only lasts about another half hour in the bed, finally heaving a defeated sigh and getting up, walking into the bathroom and shutting the door without a word. Zach sits up as if to go after him, but when he hears the water come on he lets himself fall backwards onto the bed. He feels a prick of annoyance at Chris’s absence. He wants today to be another day just like every day that’s come before, every day since January; sit next to Chris in the living room like they did yesterday, talk about buying a place in the country somewhere, not anywhere in particular but the kind of place you can have a pack of big dogs and where the school districts are good.

“I know you’re supposed to, like, be the change and everything,” Chris says. “But I just don’t know about L.A. public schools.” He frowns. “Is that really awful?”

“Yes,” Zach says. “It is.”

There’s a crash from the bathroom. Zach vaults out of the bed, half stumbling on a tangle of blankets. He shoves the door open, casting about frantically for Chris. He’s kneeling on the floor between the bathtub and the toilet, face greyish white. To match the marble, Zach thinks hysterically. The tub is full and there’s a slick of water on the floor around Chris; he’s got a towel draped over his legs.

“Oh my god,” Zach says. “What the hell happened?” 

Chris is shaking his head. “Don’t know. It...really hurt, and I felt all sick for a second.” He touches his mouth like it’s news to him he even has one. “Oh,” he says. “I think I threw up.”

Sure enough, there’s a small pool of vomit on the floor, already coagulating around the base of the trash can.

“Here,” Zach says. “Get up.” He helps Chris get shakily to his feet. He helps him down onto the toilet and sets about inspecting him for further injury, running his fingers through his hair, prodding at wherever he can reach. 

“You’ve got to be more careful,” he hears himself saying. “What if you’d fallen differently, what if you’d hurt--” he shakes his head. Chris is looking down; at first Zach thinks it’s some kind of penitence, but Chris’s eyes are closed and he doesn’t seem to be listening to Zach at all.

He gasps and clutches at his stomach, folding in on himself. “Fuck,” he says, grabbing for Zach’s hands. “Feel--”

Zach doesn’t resist; he lets Chris draw both his hands down. His stomach bows out in a way that Zach finds almost obscene, the skin stretched taut. He feels his pulse quicken. Under his hands, the whole mass seems to shift. Zach pulls the ends of the towel away and watches as something lists to one side as if to avoid him. 

“Holy shit,” Zach says. “Does that--does that hurt?”

Chris looks up at him, eyes huge. “No, but--” he winces, and Zach jerks his hand away. “Ah, god, that does.” 

“What does it feel like?” 

“Stop fucking giving me the third degree,” Chris snaps. “Not good, okay?” 

Chris’s ire is strangely cheering to Zach; it seems healthier than the cowed way he’d lain on the floor a moment ago. “Sorry,” Zach says. “I’m sorry.” 

“Forget it. Here, let me up. I’m going to go get dressed.” 

Zach moves aside and lets Chris go by. He walks out into the bedroom and Zach goes over to let the water out of the tub. He watches it swirl down the drain for a minute, then trails out after Chris for lack of anything else to do. He perches on the edge of the bed, feeling beset by nerves.

“Should you eat?” he asks. 

“Maybe? I don’t really feel like it.” He pulls on a t-shirt, one of the bigger ones Zach had to go buy, pawing through the racks at a fucking Target and coming away with a bunch of XXLs the likes of which Chris’s closet has never seen. The ubiquitous henley has long since been outgrown. Chris plucks at the waistband of a pair of sweatpants, trying to adjust it around his bulk. “Christ, something’s got to give,” he says. “I’m going to run out of clothes.” 

Zach is half-listening, and it’s only when Chris looks up at him that he realizes he was supposed to smile. 

He makes Chris some toast and hovers while he eats it a bite at a time; the deliberate nature of breakfast reminds him of the beginning and he’s not sure how to feel about it, quietly nostalgic or like he’s come through a war. He doesn’t eat himself, just downs a cup of coffee and then another, the caffeine the wrong thing for the acid in his stomach and the charge in his veins. 

After the toast, he follows Chris out into the living room. Zach doesn’t miss the way he has to pause on the way, standing up straighter and closing his eyes, just for a second but not quick enough for Zach to overlook.

“What do we do?” Zach asks. He feels like Chris is supposed to know, the way cats and fish and livestock are supposed to know about earthquakes. 

Chris ignores the question. “Come over here and sit with me,” he says, taking up his usual position at the end of the couch. Zach plasters himself to Chris’s side and takes Chris’s hand in both of his. 

“Dude, your palms are all slimy,” Chris says. 

Zach takes the back and wipes them on his pants leg. He looks out the window. It’s midmorning, and he finds that he can’t imagine this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow. Next to him, Chris sucks in a breath. 

“You could distract me,” Chris says. 

“How’m I supposed to do that?” 

“Talk to me about stuff. Or you could just--” He reaches over and pulls at Zach, tugging him closer so that if Chris had a lap these days, Zach would be in it. 

“Am I hurting you?” Zach asks. Chris feels like a time bomb. 

But he shakes his head at Zach, reaching for his hands again. “Kiss me,” he says. 

Zach gets up on his knees, leaning over Chris awkwardly. He palms Chris’s cheek, running his thumb over his lower lip. Still dry, and Chris has been chewing at the corner. There’s always going to be something about them that’s bleeding.

***

“Chris? Hey, Chris?”

Zach tries mightily to keep his voice from shaking. He doesn’t think he’s entirely successful, but Chris isn’t really paying attention anyway. He’s curled on the bed on his side, and right now his eyes are screwed shut, knuckles bloodless in his grip on the blankets. Zach crawls up next to him so that they’re eye to eye. Sweaty hair is plastered to Chris’s forehead, and Zach brushes it back with his fingers. He rests the back of his hand against the space he clears. Chris looks like he should be feverish, the way he’s shuddering beneath the sheets, but the skin of his forehead is cool. 

“I...I think we should call somebody,” Zach says.

Chris doesn’t reply; Zach can see the muscles of his jaw bulge where his teeth are clenched. 

Zach shakes his shoulder and he flinches away, eyes snapping open. He looks shocked, like he hadn’t noticed Zach get up on the bed. Afternoon has worn on into early evening and the room is dim. The entire atmosphere feels spectral to Zach, Chris pale and gibbous at its center.

“Don’t you think?” Zach says haltingly. “That we should call someone? An ambulance--” 

“No,” Chris says, breathing like he’s just come up from underwater, trying to get the words out before pain stuns him into silence again. “That’s--other people, here--no. And I can’t _go_ anywhere, Zach, I can barely walk across the room. How am I supposed to go somewhere?” 

Zach takes his hand. “I don’t see how we have a choice,” he says. “I know..I know you’re scared right now. I’m scared too, and I want to help you but I don’t know how. I’m not a doctor, Chris,” he says. “I can’t--I can’t like _cut_ it out of you--” 

“Don’t say _it_ ,” Chris says. 

“That’s not the--Sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I can’t do anything for you here, is what I’m saying.” He takes a breath, hoping the air will imbue him with some kind of authority, something to antagonize Chris’s disinclination to move from what is clearly the human version of a den. 

“Chris,” he says. “I’m--” 

Chris clutches at his hand then, crushing Zach’s fingers fit to break. His eyes close and his whole body seizes, singing with tension. “You’ve got to breathe,” Zach says. “It--everything hurts worse if you forget to breathe, it doesn’t seem like it’ll help but it will.”

Zach’s babbling, but he can’t help himself. Chris’s face looks like it’s been hacked out of flint, all angles, his eyes sunken and his cheekbones prominent. 

_Make sure he’s eating; he looks like shit._

Zach shakes his head to clear it. “I’m scared,” he says. “You’re scaring me.” 

The paroxysm seems to pass, and Chris melts bonelessly back into the bedding, head lolling onto the pillow. His hand goes limp in Zach’s, and as Chris comes back to himself slightly he opens his eyes again. “Breathe through the pain,” he says, smiling weakly. “That’s what my massage therapist always used to say.” 

“Well, it’s all muscles contracting or whatever,” Zach says, bolstered. “Listen, Chris,” he says. “I’m serious. I’m scared that if I let this go on for too long something’s going to go really wrong and I’m not going to be able to deal with it and I--I can’t just sit here holding your hand while you--while that happens.” He runs his thumb over the waxy skin of Chris’s cheek. He can feel the seconds ticking down. Chris feels accessible only incrementally; only in fits and spurts is he a person Zach can speak to. The rest of the time he’s a live wire, a collection of responses to the positive feedback loop he’s trapped in, and that’s what scares Zach the most. 

“Come on,” he says, pulling at Chris’s hand. “Sit up.” 

“I can’t,” Chris moans. “It’s about to start again, I can feel it--” 

“After, then,” Zach says. “Let me--I’ll get some stuff, okay? And then I’ll go put it in the car, and the next time you can move we’ll go.” 

Chris’s response is mostly sob, but Zach thinks there was a corresponding head movement he could conceivably take positively. “Okay,” Zach says. “I’m gonna go, but I’ll be right back.”

Chris grips his hand so that Zach has to struggle slightly to pull free. The action feels violent, and Zach feels abjectly shitty as he divests himself of Chris and turns away to dig a duffle bag out of the closet and fill it with whatever resembles a clean item of clothing. People do this in advance, he guesses, have bags packed and sitting at the door for weeks. He remembers when Joe’s kids were born, the anticipation of it. That had seemed like a party, though, nothing like this looming catastrophe. 

He zips up the bag and shoulders it, sparing a last look for Chris on the bed before he jogs out of the room and goes to get the car. 

Chris takes another half an hour to work himself from a seated position to the front door. Zach has never felt more useless in his life, aware with every step they take out of range of a piece of furniture that he’s not entirely sure he’s strong enough to deal with Chris like this, a sentiment he means in all possible ways. 

“Where do we even go?” Chris asks from the passenger seat. “I’ve never been to the hospital here before.” 

“Um,” Zach says. “Me either. Let me--” He scrolls through his phone. “Maybe I should’ve done this earlier,” he says. 

Chris reaches over and rests a heavy hand on Zach’s shoulder, rubbing a slow circle with his thumb. “God, fucking look at us,” he says. “We’re a disaster. How’re we supposed to handle a--” He whines and tenses. It hurts to watch and Zach has to look away, vaguely ashamed. 

“Are you--” 

“Just go,” Chris hisses. 

“Okay, okay.” 

They find the hospital with only one wrong turn and a minimum of profanity, which is admirable given the fact that Chris is clearly getting worse. In the glow of the red Emergency signs Zach finds himself paralyzed, and he sits idling for a moment until Chris turns to look at him. 

“What are you doing?” 

“I--I don’t know,” Zach says. “Do you want me to, like, drop you off?” 

“Aren’t you coming?” Chris’s eyes are huge. The light plays neon pink on his face. Zach thinks he looks transported, elevated by the pain to a purer sort of being than Zach, who’s staring at his hands on the steering wheel, currently foiled by the concept of parking versus valet. 

“Of course,” Zach says. “I just--can you walk in from the parking lot?” 

“I don’t want to go in there by myself,” Chris says, his voice diminished. “I--” 

His mouth falls open, and if it weren’t so dark Zach’s certain he’d see the blood drain from Chris’s face, so dramatic is the onset of the next contraction. Call them what they are, Zach says to himself. All just muscle, anyway, cells united in service to a single goal, whether or not it’s compatible with the body that houses them. 

“Oh my god, Chris? Are you--” 

Chris scrapes enough focus together to nod at Zach, but his breathing sounds different, high and shaky, and a tear leaks out of his eye and finds its way into the lines of his face. Zach puts the car in park right there in the lane. Fuck it, he can deal with a ticket or a tow, that’s the least of his fucking concerns right now. 

He gets out and slams his door shut, runs around to Chris’s and yanks it open. “Baby,” he says. “Can you walk?” 

Chris shakes his head. “Maybe--ah, maybe if you--” he waves his hand ineffectually, unable to finish the sentence. 

“That’s okay,” Zach says. “Here, you just stay in the car and I’ll go in and get some help.” 

Chris makes a face, and Zach knows he wants to argue. Chris is like a dog with a thorn in its paw when he’s sick, all bite, overcome with the urge to hide. If he could, Zach thinks, he’d lie here in the car and let his body tear itself apart, just for the sake of privacy.

But there’s another look he’s wearing, the one that says _I’m scared and I can’t stop shaking_ , and it’s for that Chris that Zach tears himself away from the car, takes himself across the silent parking lot, over the oil-sheened asphalt and into the red cast of those lights. The sliding glass doors open with a pneumatic puff and as he steps through it’s only the relatively full waiting area that stops him from shouting, makes him fix on a smile and go up to the sleepy looking woman at the desk and say: “I think my boyfriend’s sick.”

***

Zach doesn’t remember the doctor leaving. Well, the second doctor. He remembers the first doctor, the bug-eyed resident, remembers the way she looked at Chris, at him. Zach will slap her with an NDA so fast it’ll make her head spin, and he’d tell Chris this if he thought Chris had any concept of things like fame or celebrity or just the general concept of recognition, that he is a being with a face, that he has done or will do anything in his life but lie on this hospital bed and hurt.

“Chris?” 

Chris’s eyes flutter open, just barely. His knuckles are white again, his face a fishy grey. Zach’s hand has gone numb, accepting its lot as Chris’s sole link to a world outside himself and giving up the ghost accordingly. Zach doesn’t care. 

“Chris.” 

He goes slack, and it’s over for the moment. “I’m dying,” he says to Zach. 

“Shut up,” Zach says. 

“No, it’s--I think I’m serious,” Chris says speculatively, as if he’s turning the words over in his mind, shaking them out and finding them sound. 

“They’re coming back,” Zach says, nodding at the door. “She said she was going to page the surgeon, and then they’re going to come right back and they’re going to--to fix you.” 

Chris swallows. He looks up at the ceiling and nods, like Zach’s just told him it’s raining outside. _That’s nice._ He smiles at Zach, that stupid Chris smile diluted and overlain. 

“Your hand is freezing,” Zach says accusatorily. 

“Tell me about her,” Chris says. 

“What?” 

“Zach,” Chris says, saying his name like it’s a prayer. “Our baby. Tell me about her.” 

Zach sniffs. He’s all the way over here, he’s much too far away. He scoots his chair closer to the bed; its metal legs shriek against the floor. Zach gets an arm around Chris, rests his forehead against Chris's cheek. Chris sucks in his breath and his body goes rigid, and Zach starts talking. 

“She’s beautiful,” he says. “She’s--she’s gotta be, right, because you--I mean, I’m not sure how I’d look as a girl but you...yeah. And she’s smart, Chris, she’s at like a third grade reading level already and she’s not even born.” 

Chris squeezes Zach’s hand. 

“She’s going to kick our asses,” Zach says. “Because look at us, right? And she’s going to be into everything, and we’ll roll our eyes and get stressed out and yell but deep down we’ll know it’s because she’s sharp, and she’s ours and she wants to know things. And you’re going to be the good cop, I can tell already.” 

Chris smiles, a watery smile, and his tongue appears at the corner of his mouth, the scabbed-over place Zach noticed earlier. Zach reaches out and touches it carefully, folds his hand against Chris’s cheek again. 

“She’s--she’s a miracle,” he whispers. “And I know what I said before about miracles. But look at us, Chris. We were dead in the water. And I know she can’t save us, it isn’t her job to save us, but I can’t help but think that she did anyway, that this was supposed to happen somehow.” 

Zach still doesn’t believe in miracles. This is what he thinks, turns over and over in his mind as the door to the room swings open and the onslaught rushes in. His hearing goes, the blood rushing up in his ears. His vision tunnels, and there are hands on his shoulders and someone walking him to a waiting room with naugahyde chairs upholstered in seafoam and jade, patronizing and institutional colors that are supposed to prevent people from doing just this, just exactly what Zach is doing, which is losing his shit in a hospital hallway. He can’t abide it. So he jerks out of the grasp of those hands and takes off after the silver frame of Chris’s rolling bed, the tawny shock of his hair. After Chris, and after her.

And it’s slow motion after that, a queasy camera. The soundtrack cuts out and all you hear is the gust of the hero’s breathing, the obedient pump of his heart.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for 'Nine Syllables'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2634650) by [steammmpunk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/steammmpunk/pseuds/steammmpunk)




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